Every day, all over the U.S., cancer patients are hooked up to machines pumping heavy-duty drugs into their bodies to try and send their cancer into remission.
Despite the terrible side effects of chemo — such as nausea, exhaustion, and hair loss — patients put up with it for the greater good of hoping to beat their cancer.
That’s what we’ve been told to do.
I certainly hope that’s not a choice you or someone you love ever have to make.
But if you do, you should know about a frightening study that’s been released detailing the “cascade of events” chemo can cause that don’t lead to a cure.
Instead, it can lead to something even more deadly than that original cancer.
And it’s not the first time we’ve heard this horror story.
The ‘cure’ that can kill
Just last month, I told you about a new study out of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that discovered how commonly used chemo drugs for breast cancer can “open the door” for cancer cells to set up all over your body.
The Einstein scientists spent years researching the exact way cancer metastasizes. And they recently learned a whole lot more — especially how chemo can trigger rogue cancer cells to join up with special immune cells that create an opening for them to enter the bloodstream.
At the time, I remarked at how very strange it was for the media to give so little coverage to such important research.
Well, this new study has gotten even less.
And every new finding detailing how chemotherapy can make cancer deadlier should sound the alarm even louder.
What the scientists at Ohio State University discovered, which builds on that previous research, is that the conventional breast-cancer chemo drug paclitaxel (one of the ones tested in the other study, too) can trigger a double-whammy of lethal events.
First, the Ohio researchers found that the drug sets off a “variety of molecular-level changes” that give breast-cancer cells an easy way to break away from the tumor.
Next, paclitaxel can make the lungs “more hospitable” for the cancer cells to set up shop there, putting patients at risk not only for breast cancer… but lung cancer, too.
The senior author of this study remarked that the idea chemo can “paradoxically promote cancer progression is an emerging revelation in cancer research.” And while this study was done using mice (as was the other one), the scientists say that it appears to be “relevant” to how the disease metastasizes in people, based on their analysis of data from women with breast cancer.
And while your newsfeed may have been full of stories about how living near a Trader Joe’s store will increase the value of your home… or how packing lunches for their kids really stresses parents out… this vital research got left by the wayside.
But seriously, this revelation has been emerging for some time now. You might call it one of the best-kept secrets in medicine as far as patients are concerned.
For example, over a decade ago, researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center said that paclitaxel (also known as Taxol) is so toxic that it can activate a protein that “produces an inflammatory response that induces metastasis.”
The media must have missed the memo on these findings — or the fact that curcumin (an ingredient in the spice turmeric) can prevent that from happening and stop the chemo-induced spread of breast cancer.
Neither one of those important pieces of news got the press they deserved.
And two years ago, a study out of the Washington University School of Medicine told how paclitaxel ironically “both kills and activates tumor cells,” increasing metastasis.
But I’ll bet you didn’t hear that news, either.
As I said last month, it’s simply outrageous that cancer patients are being asked to submit to this potentially deadly treatment without being given all the information and tools out there to allow them to make an informed decision.
Of course, as an eAlert reader these are the things you know you can always depend on us to keep you informed about — for example, a diagnostic test called “MammaPrint.” It can tell you how likely it is that your breast cancer will return and give you a better idea as to whether chemo will be of any benefit.
The bottom line is that receiving chemo is a major decision that shouldn’t be entered into just because that’s “how we treat cancer.” It deserves careful consideration of all your options — and, at the very least, a second or even third opinion.
“How a chemo drug can help cancer spread from the breast to the lungs” Ohio State University, August 4, 2017, Newswise, newswise.com