Forward Look
An Overlooked Long-Term Side Effect
Q&A with Patricia Ganz on chemotherapy-related nerve damage
By Sue Rochman
By Sue Rochman
At one time, treatment-related side effects were generally thought of as the price cancer patients had to pay for a chance of survival. Medical oncologist Patricia Ganz at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has spent the past 40 years conducting studies aimed at challenging this perception. Ganz’s research on cancer survivorship and quality of life forms the cornerstone of the field of survivorship research.
The February 2018 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute will include two articles Ganz co-authored on peripheral neuropathy, nerve damage that causes numbness, pain and tingling in the hands and feet. Although the research papers focus on breast cancer patients who were treated with chemotherapy, long-term peripheral neuropathy is a problem for many cancer patients. In the first article, a research review, Ganz and her colleagues report that they were able to find only five papers on studies that followed patients for a year or more and asked about symptoms related to nerve damage. In the second paper, her team re-examined data on 1,512 early-stage breast cancer patients in a national chemotherapy trial. They found that two years after starting treatment, 42 percent of patients experienced neuropathy symptoms and 10 percent reported severe discomfort.
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