Chemotherapy can have a number of side effects, including nausea, vomiting, fatigue and hair loss. Emanuel, of the National Institutes of Health, and his team looked at the billing records of nearly 8,000 patients who died from cancer in the state of Massachusetts in 1996.
Chemotherapy is given in the exact same frequency.
The study underscores the belief that chemotherapy is used even when evidence has shown that certain cancers continue unabated by the treatment. There is also the hope that the chemotherapy treatment may offer some improvement in the patient's quality of life, he explained. Emanuel also stressed that treating patients with chemotherapy during the last year of life is expensive. Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.