CANCER SURVIVORS

Long Term Side Effects

by Alex Hutchins

4% of Americans have

some type of cancer and the

numbers continue to escalate…

Heart  problems,

are common long-term side effects of chemotherapy drugs.

Others include,

osteoporosis, nerve damage, early menopause, infertility, leukemia, and the recurrence of cancer.

According to the Mayo Clinic,

Late effects are side effects of cancer treatment that become apparent after your treatment has ended. Cancer survivors might experience late effects of cancer treatment years later.

Late effects of cancer treatment can come from any of the three main types of cancer treatment: chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. As newer types of cancer treatment are developed, doctors may find that these treatments also cause late effects in cancer survivors.    To view list of long term side effects, click here

According to the American Cancer Society,

For many people with cancer, chemotherapy is the best option for controlling their disease. You may be faced, however, with long-term side effects related to your chemotherapy treatments.

In some cases, side effects related to specific chemotherapy drugs can continue after the treatment is over. These effects can progress and become chronic, or new side effects may develop. Long-term side effects depend on the specific drugs received and whether you had other treatments, such as radiation therapy.  Read more,

As reported by Debra Sherman, Reuters, in June of this year,

CHICAGO - Mario Alberico got his education in oncology the hard way. He has lived with cancer and the long-term effects of his treatment for most of his life.

At 51, Alberico has finally assembled a team of doctors near his home in suburban Chicago to manage his care. Before that, he saw one doctor after another who failed to recognize serious health problems that stemmed from radiation and chemotherapy drugs used to treat his bone cancer decades earlier.

During his senior year of high school, Alberico, the seventh of nine children supported by his widowed mother, got radiation and rotated through 4 different chemotherapy drugs at high doses that eradicated the cancer. Each one of those drugs can have grave long-term effects.

As Alberico and many other cancer patients have learned, most doctors outside the oncology  community never learned about the impact cancer treatment may have on the longer lifespan they fought to achieve.

That has deep implications for the ranks of U.S. cancer survivors, which have quadrupled to nearly 12 million people since the 1970s, according to the National Cancer Institute.

A survey of 1,072 primary care doctors (PCP), which include internists and family practitioners, showed that 94 percent of them were unaware of the long-term side effects of four of the most commonly used chemotherapy drugs used to treat breast and prostate cancer.

Better treatments and an aging population are expected to fuel this trend in the coming years. At the same time, many health insurance plans will only cover oncology visits for a limited period of time, eventually pushing patients back to family doctors or internists.

Dr. L. Nekhlyudov

 "Oncologists didn't know as much as one would think either. That was surprising," said Dr Larissa Nekhlyudov, a general internist who is the director of Cancer Research in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the study.

"There's no way a PCP can know all the late effects of these drugs. There's too much and they keep changing," Nekhlyudov said. "This will become more important as a discipline of study. This needs to be taught in medical schools. There's some movement, but very little."

For those of you who do not have cancer, this posting may not “strike home” or mean much; but, for those people who do have cancer or have survived cancer, like my blog partner and I, this knowledge and awareness is very important. 

For example, at the time I was diagnosed with Lymphoma, I also discovered that I had experienced a severe heart attack that permanently damaged my left heart muscle substantially reducing my heart’s ability to pump blood out to the rest of my body.  Even without chemo, I will experience chronic fatigue for the rest of my life.  Now, coupled with the aggressive chemo treatment I had for Lymphoma my heart’s (and lungs) ability to function properly is seriously reduced the older I become.

It is difficult for me to accept because up until I was diagnosed with heart disease and cancer, I had NEVER been sick and only had visited the doctor for routine annual check-ups; but my life was turned upside down in 2009.

 

There are millions of potential cancer victims coming behind me and their plight needs to be understood, accepted, and managed by the rest of us, so that they can have the best quality-of-life possible. 

We have not even touched upon the
 long term psychological side effects . . .

Thank you for reading!