Side Effects of Low-Dose Chemotherapy

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Dr. David Cathcart, I'm a family practice physician from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, and we're going to talk about chemotherapy drugs and their side effects today. Doctors have been disappointed often times in the results they get with conventional chemotherapy, primarily because the dosing that is required for chemotherapy has such severe side effects that many people refer to treatment as death by chemotherapy, rather than death by the cancer. Low dose chemotherapy has far less side effects, and it gives the opportunity for the clinician to do something for his patients that he otherwise may not be able to do. The interesting thing is that low dose chemotherapy does seem to have some effect. It certainly reduces the side effects that people have, and in many of the studies that have been done, people do live, do have response to the low dose chemotherapy. Unfortunately, in most of the stages that have been done today when the low dose chemotherapy is stopped or even in many cases when it's continued the cancer will still come back, and they still may ultimately die from it. Now there is another interesting thing about low dose chemotherapy, and that is that researchers are starting to see that it doesn't seem to work the same way that conventional higher dose chemotherapy does. In that, it may actually effect the blood cell or the nutrient supply of blood to that tumor that keeps it alive. So some how or other the low dose chemotherapy seems to effect the ability of the blood vessel to provide oxygen rich or nutrient rich blood cells to those cancer cells. So for whatever reason, and the jury is still out, and certainly low dose chemotherapy is not the preferred treatment of choice for most people. Low dose chemotherapy does have a place in cancer treatment. In that it helps limit the side effects even though it may work in a little different way than what we have grown to understand. This is Dr. Cathcart talking about the effects and benefits of low dose chemotherapy."