Veritas Medicine article

[Guest guest]

I thought this message was extremely important to all those out there that

are trying to make up their minds about treatment soon, especially in light

of the fact that we most always have to choose between Hard Chemo's on one

hand and then milder mixtures or Rituxan by itself on the other hand. This

article is good to read if your in the middle of such a decision.

All the best in your decisions, Kurt

Veritas current report:

Chemotherapy and the Immune System

12/12/2003

Although chemotherapy is effective medicine against many kinds of leukemia,

it is far from perfect, and fails to work completely in its job of killing

cancer cells all too often. Worse still, chemotherapy can cause serious

side effects. One of the most serious side effects is the risk of

infection. Chemotherapy drugs kill not only cancer cells, but also normal

immune cells as well. This tends to open the door to many kinds of

infections that most people not receiving chemotherapy can easily fight off.

Not all chemotherapy regimens cause problems with the immune system. Some of

the more gentle cocktails leave the infection-fighting cells more-or-less

intact. Other kinds of protocols are much more intensive and tend to damage

the immune system much more severely.

Researchers in Germany studied a particularly intensive chemotherapy regimen

used to treat childhood acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). They found that

there was a very high rate of infection in treated patients. Almost

one-third of patients developed serious infections during their therapy,

including blood-stream infections or pneumonia. And nearly 1 in 10 patients

died from complications of these infections. The majority of patients tended

to get infections at the start of the chemotherapy protocol when the dosing

is most intensive and blood counts tend to be lowest.

This is clearly a serious problem. The researchers suggest that all children

being treated with chemotherapy for AML be treated at specialist hospitals

where they can be carefully followed for signs of infections and treated

aggressively if they get ill. More importantly, this study shows how urgent

the need is for therapies that selectively target leukemia cells and leave

the immune system alone. Only when the treatment is not as bad as the

disease itself will we start to do a better job of battling leukemia.

Reference:

Lehrnbecher T, Varwig D, Kaiser J, Reinhardt D, Klingebiel T, Creutzig U.

Infectious complications in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia: analysis of

the prospective multi-institutional clinical trial AML-BFM 93. Leukemia

2003; advanced online publication.