What can be the late effects of chemotherapy?
In addition to the typical side effects such as hair loss, vomiting and an increased tendency to infections, complications can also occur in the long term. Especially with young women, certain long-term risks must be weighed up. If a woman wishes to have children, she must be informed about potential damage to the ovary and restrictions in fertility.
After chemotherapy, it is possible that the menstrual cycle will stop altogether and the menopause will occur earlier. Further late effects also depend on the individual chemotherapeutic agent. Various substances can be very harmful during pregnancy or even attack the heart and damage the heart muscle.
Rarely can the drugs cause blood cancer due to the changes in the blood-forming cells. A rare long-term complication of chemotherapy is the development of polyneuropathy, i.e. damage to several nerves. Typical drugs used in chemotherapy that can cause this are capecitabine and taxanes.
They can attack the nerves outside the brain and damage them. The damage can initially cause tingling, numbness and numbness in the arms and legs. Later, even complete paralysis of the muscles in the extremities can occur.
Cytostatics
The aim of chemotherapy is to kill as many cancer cells as possible that are present in the body and at the same time to protect the body’s own tissue as best as possible. The drugs used in chemotherapy for breast cancer are called cytostatic drugs. There are many different groups of cytostatic drugs, all of which have different starting points.
What they all have in common, however, is that they prevent the proliferation of tumour cells. Unfortunately, most of these drugs cannot differentiate sufficiently between cancer cells and body cells and therefore generally attack fast-dividing cells, which is why most side effects of a therapy with cytostatic drugs occur. Two groups of cytostatic drugs are particularly popular for the treatment of breast cancer: Anthracyclines interfere with the structure of the tumour cells’ DNA and thus damage their genetic information.
As a result, the cell is no longer able to divide properly. Examples are the drugs doxorubicin and epirubicin. Taxanes are usually administered when metastases have been found in the lymph nodes of the armpit, often in addition to the anthracyclines.
They also intervene in the division process of cancer cells. This happens because the so-called cell spindles are disturbed in their task of dividing the genetic material fairly between the two daughter cells during cell division. In addition, they directly damage the genetic material and the cell wall of the tumour. Important representatives of this group are paclitaxel and docetaxel. – anthracyclines and
- Taxanes.
Mono- or combination therapy
Often, different cytostatic drugs are combined in therapy in order to hit breast cancer as hard as possible. However, this also means a higher burden on the patient’s other body. For this reason, especially in the case of tumours in advanced stages, sometimes monotherapy, i.e. therapy with only one active substance, is chosen to ensure that the rest of the body is spared.
