Claim: Hard questions about chemo
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Chemotherapy
text: are used to treat some cases of non-melanoma skin cancer. If the cancer has central nervous system involvement, or with meningeal disease, intrathecal chemotherapy may be administered. Chemotherapeutic techniques have a range of side-effects that depend on the type of medications used. The most common medications affect mainly the fast-dividing cells of the body, such as blood cells and the cells lining the mouth, stomach, and intestines. Chemotherapy-related toxicities can occur acutely after administration, within hours or days, or chronically, from weeks to years. Virtually all chemotherapeutic regimens can cause depression of the immune system, often by paralysing the bone

title: Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment
text: Survivors often report difficulty multitasking, comprehending what they have just read, following the thread of a conversation, and retrieving words. Breast cancer survivors who were treated with chemotherapy may find it harder to perform tasks than survivors whose treatment was surgical. One study demonstrated that, a year after treatment, the brains of cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy (after surgery) had physically shrunk while those of people only treated surgically had not. Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment comes as a surprise to many cancer survivors. Often, survivors think their lives will return to normal when the cancer is gone, only to find that

title: Simon O'Donnell
text: me the bi-op was malignant... [Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma] John found it hard to tell me and I found it hard to accept... I had to ring Mum and Dad in Deniliquin to tell them there was some bad news. Somehow you float through it even though you are scared s---less... The hardest part is the initial part, once you know what's in front of you it gets better. I don't want to trivialise cancer in any way. You have to let the emotion out then sit down and become realistic ... I never asked if my life was in the balance.

title: Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment
text: survivors in the population, many of whom may have been treated with aggressive dosing of chemotherapeutic agents, or with chemotherapy as an adjuvant to other forms of treatment. In some patients, fear of PCCI can impact treatment decisions. The magnitude of chemotherapy-related cognitive changes and their impact on the activities of daily living are uncertain. The systems of the body most affected by chemotherapy drugs include visual and semantic memory, attention and motor coordination. These effects can impair a chemotherapy patient's ability to understand and make decisions regarding treatment, perform in school or employment and can reduce quality of life.

title: Autologous immune enhancement therapy
text: and destruction. While surgery and/or chemo- and radiotherapies are various treatment modalities available, still in many cases they don’t offer a permanent cure. Another major point to be addressed about this killer disease is the relapse rate which is very high. Researchers have found that these cells mainly target the cancer cells and not the healthy cells whereas in chemotherapy and radiotherapy the healthy cells are also getting destroyed. Cancer cells are formed in our body almost every day but we are not affected by them. This is because they are immediately destroyed by the body's immune system. The immune

title: Small-cell carcinoma
text: RT has been shown to improve survival in LS-SCLC. Exceptionally high objective initial response rates (RR) of between 60% and 90% are seen in LS-SCLC using chemotherapy alone, with between 45% and 75% of individuals showing a "complete response" (CR), which is defined as the disappearance of all radiological and clinical signs of tumor. However, relapse rate remains high, and median survival is only 18 to 24 months. Because SCLC usually metastasizes widely very early on in the natural history of the tumor, and because nearly all cases respond dramatically to chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, there has been little role for

title: Chemotherapy
text: the exception; with these drugs, sensation may continue to deteriorate for several months after the end of treatment. Some CIPN appears to be irreversible. Pain can often be managed with drug or other treatment but the numbness is usually resistant to treatment. Some people receiving chemotherapy report fatigue or non-specific neurocognitive problems, such as an inability to concentrate; this is sometimes called post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment, referred to as "chemo brain" in popular and social media. In particularly large tumors and cancers with high white cell counts, such as lymphomas, teratomas, and some leukemias, some people develop tumor lysis syndrome. The

title: Childhood cancer
text: system metastasis or from side effects of cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Studies have shown that chemo and radiation therapies may damage brain white matter and disrupt brain activity. The most common cancers in children are (childhood) leukemia (32%), brain tumors (18%), and lymphomas (11%). In 2005, 4.1 of every 100,000 young people under 20 years of age in the U.S. were diagnosed with leukemia, and 0.8 per 100,000 died from it. The number of new cases was highest among the 1–4 age group, but the number of deaths was highest among the 10–14 age group. In

title: Brain metastasis
text: survival compared to whole brain irradiation alone. Therefore, in patients with only one metastatic brain lesion and controlled or limited systemic disease, a life expectancy of at least 3 months and a good performance status might be expected. Chemotherapy is rarely used for the treatment of brain metastases, as chemotherapeutic agents penetrate the blood brain barrier poorly. However, some cancers such as lymphomas, small cell lung carcinomas (SCLC) and breast cancer may be highly chemosensitive and chemotherapy may be used to treat extracranial sites of metastatic disease in these cancers. The effectiveness and safety of using chemotherapy to treat a

title: Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment
text: primarily in breast cancer survivor and support groups as affecting a subset of individuals treated with chemotherapy, who attributed it to the effects of the medication taken to treat their cancers. The term "chemobrain" appears in publications at least as early as 1997. Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment (PCCI) (also known in the scientific community as "CRCIs or Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Impairments" and in lay terms as chemotherapy-induced cognitive dysfunction or impairment, chemo brain, or chemo fog) describes the cognitive impairment that can result from chemotherapy treatment. Approximately 20–30% of people who undergo chemotherapy experience some level of post-chemotherapy cognitive

title: Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment
text: Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment (PCCI) (also known in the scientific community as "CRCIs or Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Impairments" and in lay terms as chemotherapy-induced cognitive dysfunction or impairment, chemo brain, or chemo fog) describes the cognitive impairment that can result from chemotherapy treatment. Approximately 20–30% of people who undergo chemotherapy experience some level of post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment. The phenomenon first came to light because of the large number of breast cancer survivors who complained of changes in memory, fluency, and other cognitive abilities that impeded their ability to function as they had pre-chemotherapy. Although the causes and existence of

title: Chemotherapy
text: than four-fifths of people with colorectal cancer still believed that chemotherapy was likely to cure their cancer. The blood–brain barrier poses an obstacle to delivery of chemotherapy to the brain. This is because the brain has an extensive system in place to protect it from harmful chemicals. Drug transporters can pump out drugs from the brain and brain's blood vessel cells into the cerebrospinal fluid and blood circulation. These transporters pump out most chemotherapy drugs, which reduces their efficacy for treatment of brain tumors. Only small lipophilic alkylating agents such as lomustine or temozolomide are able to cross this blood–brain

title: Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment
text: the brain was found, most notably in the frontal cortex and cerebellum. The most significant difference of blood flow was found in the inferior frontal gyrus. Authors report resting metabolism in this area is associated with performance on short term memory tasks. While post-treatment studies suggest significant negative side effects of chemotherapy on cognition, other studies have indicated that there may be baseline vulnerability factors which could contribute to cognitive impairment development. Such factors may include menopausal status, surgery/anesthesia, stress, genetics and fatigue, among other suspected confounding variables. For a full review of Neuroimaging studies and chemobrain/chemofog, refer to this

title: Being Mortal
text: that the majority of her patients know that they are going to die, but are hopeful that they live longer, very few have accepted their fate. Dave Galloway was an interviewed patient with pancreatic cancer who needs a comfort pack that is useful medication. His wife distributes it to him while he is at home and happy. He talks about a statistic that people who stopped chemotherapy and went into hospice lived 25% longer. Hard Conversations- Gawande becomes a character in the story as this chapter deals with his dad suffering from a spinal cord tumor. He consults with two

title: Physical oncology
text: of the best experimental models. The link between the clinic and the experiment becomes more realistic since these 3D cultures make it possible to use the culture medium surrounding the growing tumor tissue as a "virtual ECM", which can be varied, for example, to increase the pressure around the tumor grown. Similarly, xenograft can constitute a cancer organ with both tissues even if the ECM is of animal origin. What is hard in cancer It's the ECM. So, when a doctor or a patient feels "a hard lump in the breast" and it is a cancer, what is hard is

title: Desmoplastic small-round-cell tumor
text: bones, uterus, bladder, genitals, abdominal cavity, and the brain. A multi-modality approach of high-dose chemotherapy, aggressive surgical resection, radiation, and stem cell rescue improves survival for some patients. Reports have indicated that patients will initially respond to first line chemotherapy and treatment but that relapse is common. Some patients in remission or with inoperable tumor seem to benefit from long term low dose chemotherapy, turning DSRCT into a chronic disease. The Stehlin Foundation currently offers DSRCT patients the opportunity to send samples of their tumors free of charge for testing. Research scientists are growing the samples on nude mice and

title: Chemotherapy
text: drugs oxaliplatin and cyclophosphamide can cause tumor cells to die in a way that is detectable by the immune system (called immunogenic cell death), which mobilizes immune cells with antitumor functions. Chemotherapeutic drugs that cancer immunogenic tumor cell death can make unresponsive tumors sensitive to immune checkpoint therapy. Some chemotherapy drugs are used in diseases other than cancer, such as in autoimmune disorders, and noncancerous plasma cell dyscrasia. In some cases they are often used at lower doses, which means that the side effects are minimized, while in other cases doses similar to ones used to treat cancer are used.

title: Primary central nervous system lymphoma
text: 13 patients reported responses in 10 (77%). Five of the responses were complete. The initial response to radiotherapy is often excellent, and may result in a complete remission. However, the duration of response with radiotherapy alone remains short, with median survival after treatment with radiotherapy just 18 months. Methotrexate based chemotherapy markedly improves survival, with some studies showing median survival after methotrexate chemotherapy reaching 48 months. Patients with AIDS and PCNSL have a median survival of only 4 months with radiotherapy alone. Untreated, median survival is only 2.5 months, sometimes due to concurrent opportunistic infections rather than the lymphoma itself.

title: Chemotherapy
text: Chemotherapy Chemotherapy (often abbreviated to chemo and sometimes CTX or CTx) is a type of cancer treatment that uses one or more anti-cancer drugs (chemotherapeutic agents) as part of a standardized chemotherapy regimen. Chemotherapy may be given with a curative intent (which almost always involves combinations of drugs), or it may aim to prolong life or to reduce symptoms (palliative chemotherapy). Chemotherapy is one of the major categories of the medical discipline specifically devoted to pharmacotherapy for cancer, which is called "medical oncology". The term "chemotherapy" has come to connote non-specific usage of intracellular poisons to inhibit mitosis, cell division.

title: Autologous immune enhancement therapy
text: is deep, total removal of the cancer growth by surgery may not be possible. At times, after surgical removal of a part of the cancer, radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy may be necessary to treat the remnant portion of cancer. It is widely known that Chemotherapy has profound toxic side effects and has limitations in efficacy. Radiotherapy is also a very effective mode of treatment in certain types of cancer, but it has its own adverse effects as well. These two modalities affect not only the cancer affected cells, but also the normal cells Now in AIET, specific types of cells mainly