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The English daily The Telegraph recently reported on the findings of the latest study examining the risks of cancer drugs.
It found that chemotherapy kills up to half of oncology patients in some English hospitals.
The research was the first time scientists focused on the number of oncology patients who died within the first 30 days of starting chemotherapy.
This indicates that the patient succumbed not to the cancer itself, but to the consequences of administering the drugs.
The study was carried out in collaboration with Public Health England and Cancer Research UK.
What the study revealed.
When examining the number of deaths they encountered relatively large discrepancies.
On average across the whole of the UK, 8.4% of patients with lung cancer and 2.4% of patients with breast cancer died within the first 30 days of treatment. In hospices this figure was around 30%, as these are facilities where palliative care is provided and a patient’s death is more or less expected.
However, the scientists were surprised that in some hospitals, such as Milton Keynes, the mortality rate for the mentioned types of cancer differed significantly from the average and reached an astonishing 50.9%.
Public Health England therefore contacted the relevant hospitals to review the practices and procedures used there.
As Dr. Jim Rashbass, head of the oncology department, states:
“Chemotherapy is an integral part of oncology treatment protocols and is the main reason for improved patient survival rates over the past four decades.
It is, however, also an extremely powerful drug with serious side effects. Sometimes finding the balance of which patients to continue treating and which not to treat can be very difficult.”
The study examined more than 23,000 women with breast cancer and nearly 10,000 men with non-small cell lung carcinoma who underwent chemotherapy in 2014.
Of these, 1,383 died within the first 30 days of treatment.
What the scientists recommend regarding oncologists’ approach to chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy is a toxic substance for the body and does not distinguish between healthy and diseased cells.
Researchers found that there were significant differences in outcomes for older people and people with more compromised health. They therefore recommend that doctors be more cautious in selecting patients to whom they prescribe chemotherapy, because it can do more harm than good.
“The statistics do not point to bad practice in general, but there are exceptions,” says Professor David Dodwell of the Oncology Institute at St. James’s Hospital in Leeds, Great Britain.
“It may be a data issue, but in any case it highlights a problem that exists in clinical practice.
I think it is important to warn patients that chemotherapy can have life-threatening consequences. And doctors should be much more cautious in whom they prescribe chemotherapy to.”
Professor David Cameron of the Oncology Centre at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, adds:
“Our concern is that some patients who died within the first 30 days of treatment should not have been given chemotherapy at all.
The question is, how many of them? There is no precise answer to that. However, we should focus on those hospitals where mortality is higher than average.
On the other hand, some patients whom we do not prescribe chemotherapy to may die because they did not receive it. It is a delicate balance and the more data we have on this, the better we will be able to make decisions.”
Conclusion:
The scientists who participated in the study all stated that chemotherapy represents a serious risk to a patient’s health, sometimes even greater than the cancer itself.
Therefore the decision of whether to prescribe it to a patient should not be made recklessly.
It is always necessary to assess the patient’s overall condition, their best interests, and also to take into account their wishes so that unnecessary suffering is not caused.
