Side Effects of Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a sort of treatment based on various combinations of drugs that are meant to reduce the growth of cancerous cells within a patients body. But while following this treatment or so-called therapy, the patient may have to deal with several side effects of chemotherapy.

Hair loss or alopecia makes the most visible of the side effects of chemotherapy although it is false to assume that someone suffering from thinning hair or alopecia is necessarily ill with cancer. How is chemotherapy hair loss explained? Well, chemotherapy is a treatment relying on chemicals that are meant either to inhibit or kill the cells that grow or replicate too fast.

The trouble is that the treatment is directed towards all the cells in the body that have this characteristic disregarding whether they are cancer cells or healthy cells. Thus, besides hair loss, other side effects of chemotherapy administration include skin decay and digestive problems, because both hair and soft membranes are constantly renewing themselves.

Even if this is one of the side effects of chemotherapy that most people are familiar with, we may not know that alopecia is only temporary. At the end of the treatment the hair follicles will resume normal functionality. After a while, hair will start growing back but its texture and color may be a bit different from what you were used to having before.

True, there are pretty many side effects of chemotherapy and researchers have been doing their best to find ways of preventing them from happening or at least reducing them. You can prevent hair loss for instance by putting some cold compresses on the scalp and thus reduce the blood circulation in the area. As a result, the blood will not carry the drug to the hair follicles and hair loss will be diminished although not completely stopped.

All in all, side effects of chemotherapy remain numerous and doctors are still trying to reduce their number. Even if one solution to preventing side effects from appearing is available, the same solution may not work for another drug that leads to the same problem. The same goes for hair loss; the cold cap may have the wanted effect of doing away with alopecia only in the case of certain drugs, but it may not work with some other ones.

Filed Under: Chemotherapy