Dealing with the Side Effects of Treatment Now and Later
And our first question comes from Janet.
JANET: Yes, I understand that when you take the chemotherapy there’s a term called chemo brain, is that correct?
DR. BANU ARUN: Yes.
JANET: Right. Now does the memory get better after a while, because this was eight years ago and my memory is still, still bad?
DR. BANU ARUN: Right. So Janet that’s a very good question, I’m glad that you brought it up. There’s one major problem with the chemo brain. We have given it a name, but nobody knows what the mechanism is and how it happens. So therefore we don’t know how to fix it. Many studies have not shown any structural changes on CTs and MRIs, it’s more what our patients describe, cognitive dysfunctions, memory, maybe not being sharp or remembering. What I have experienced is that it gets better with time and a number of my patients tell me that you know, they do, they keep themselves busy, do puzzles and the new Sudoko, which is very in and that really helps. But I think that’s the only thing we can say, is that we really don’t know what is causing it, but it’s real, it’s there and we tell our patients to kind of keep occupying, kind of training, exercising with the brain. And in many patients it gets better. In some there is a residual effect where the patient still keeps complaining of the cognitive dysfunctions and kind of learns to live with that.
JANET: Yes. Are you saying though that you, you’re saying that you don’t know whether the chemotherapy causes it actually?
DR. BANU ARUN: No I’m saying that the chemotherapy causes it, but we don’t know how and why. That’s why we don’t know how to really fix it, but research is going on in that area.
JANET: And when you say it gets better in time, what do you mean exactly, do you have a time period, like this is eight years ago?
DR. BANU ARUN: Right. It takes, usually it gets better within a year, and then…
JANET: Within a year?
DR. BANU ARUN: Yes.
OPERATOR: Yes, our next question comes from Bays (sp?).
BAYS: I’m glad that you’re having this conference. You’re the first one I ever heard. I was diagnosed with CML leukemia and inflammatory breast cancer and every time I ask the doctor, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg, none of them could ever answer, other than the Leukemia Lymphoma Society said that the leukemia is usually the secondary.
DR. BANU ARUN: Right. Usually what happens is that the leukemia risk increases, but not all of them, but some of the breast cancer drugs and I don’t know what you received. But it takes about 15 years or so. So I don’t know what the timing of your diagnosis is, if you got breast cancer and then…
BAYS: They’re both the same. They were both diagnosed October of ‘04.
DR. BANU ARUN: Yes so then the breast cancer treatment has not caused it.
BAYS: Not the treatments just the condition.
DR. BANU ARUN: I don’t, I don’t think that there is a known condition linking breast cancer to leukemia genetically at this point. There are no genes where we know that if a person has a gene that she will develop breast and, breast cancer and leukemia. It might be that it’s just two separate cancers and we have patients developing breast cancer and lung cancer separately or leukemia and ovarian cancer separately. But there is no known direct relation at this point, if it happens the same time.
BAYS: Thank you.
OPERATOR: And your next question comes from Kristen.
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