About 29 percent of chemotherapy patients reported severe or very severe pain, compared with 19 percent of women who didn’t receive chemo.

Women who had both chemotherapy and radiation treatment were 30 percent more likely to report a severe side effect, compared to women who had only one of those treatments.


Women who had double mastectomy were twice as likely as those who had lumpectomy to report severe or very severe pain.

Severe side effects were also more common for Latina women, who were 30 percent more likely than white women to report a severe or very severe side effect.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove that certain treatments directly cause specific severe side effects, the authors note. Researchers also lacked data on the timing or dosing of chemotherapy and radiation, both of which can influence the severity of side effects.

“It is intuitive that patients who have worse disease, and who therefore require more therapy, experience worse toxicity,” said Dr. Anees Chagpar, a researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Still, the results should encourage doctors to consider when patients' treatment regimens might be to achieve the same survival benefit with side effects, Chagpar added by email.

“The treatments we have for cancer are very effective, but there is a growing recognition of the ‘collateral damage’ that can accompany these treatments,” said Dr. Shelley Hwang, a researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Patients should recognize two things: first, that cancer treatments involve trade-offs; second, that some toxicities can be long-lasting,” Hwang added by email.


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2ku8CO6 Cancer, online January 24, 2017.

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