Posts Tagged ‘chemotherapy’

Brain fog from chemotherapy and radiotherapy

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

It’s distressing when a patient’s oncologist refuses to recognize that their chemotherapy or radiation treatments can cause cognitive dysfunction as a serious side-effect. As stated in this paper published recently in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet: “Treatment-induced CNS [central nervous system] toxicity remains a major cause of morbidity in patients with cancer…subtle changes such as progressive cognitive dysfunction are increasingly reported after radiotherapy…or chemotherapy. Everybody needs a strategy for brain health, all the more so with these demanding interventions.

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Antioxidants and chemotherapy toxicity

Friday, November 20th, 2009

This meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Cancer evaluates 33 studies including 2,446 subjects to evaluate “the effects of concurrent use of antioxidants with chemotherapy on toxic side effects…This review provides the first systematically reviewed evidence that antioxidant supplementation during chemotherapy holds potential for reducing dose-limiting toxicities.”

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Insist on truly personalized oncology

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

The National Cancer Institute is giving lip service to “personalized oncology”, while tumor cell culture chemosensitivity testing for optimizing chemotherapy has languished in a backwater. See this brief report by Dr. Ralph Moss of Cancer Decisions.

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High-dose antioxidants enhance chemotherapy

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Here we have a report on the increase in effectiveness of cisplatin chemotherapy when combined with high-dose antioxidants and fish oil. This is especially interesting in light of the (unproven) assumption by many oncologists  that antioxidants may interfere with chemotherapy.

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