Researchers detail chemotherapy’s damage to the brain
April 22, 2008 | Source: KurzweilAI
Researchers at University of Rochester Medical Center and Harvard Medical School have found a widely used chemotherapy drug, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), causes healthy brain cells to die off long after treatment has ended and may be an underlying biological cause of the cognitive side effects (“chemo brain”) that many cancer patients experience.
They linked 5-FU to a progressing collapse of populations of stem cells and their progeny in the central nervous system, causing a disruption of myelin-forming cells.
Previous research by this team had helped establish that chemotherapy could acutely affect the brain, and this new study explains why it can have lingering impacts.
Cancer patients have long complained of cognitive side effects to chemotherapy, but until very recently, these side effects were often dismissed as the byproduct of fatigue, depression, and anxiety.