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There is probably no person in whom chemotherapy would not arouse fear.
Nevertheless, the majority of patients with oncological disease are persuaded to undergo it, because doctors emphasize that its benefits outweigh the unpleasant side effects.
Unfortunately, a new study showed that undergoing chemotherapy before a surgical procedure actually increases the amount of cancer cells in the blood and spreads the cancer into other, previously healthy parts of the body.
This new finding therefore further undermines the traditional notion of chemotherapy as an effective cure for cancer.
What the study found about the effects of chemotherapy
According to a study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, several classic chemotherapeutic drugs against breast cancer caused the amount of microscopic structures in breast tumors to begin to increase.
It is a phenomenon called “tumor microenvironment metastasis (TMEM)”, which allows cells of invasive types of cancer to separate from the primary tumor and begin to circulate through the body.
This is a very significant discovery, because it is the metastases in distant parts of the body that kill oncology patients, not the original primary tumor.
In the aforementioned study scientists used 4 models in mice that developed breast cancer.
Their aim was to simulate human patients who are given chemotherapy before surgery to shrink the tumor in the breast and remove cancer cells that may have reached nearby lymph nodes.
The study concluded that in mice given the chemotherapy paclitaxel, there were 2 to 3 times more TMEM cells than in those that did not receive chemotherapy.
Furthermore, the activity of these cancer cells was also increased, which manifested in a higher concentration of macrophages and also increased formation of blood vessels nourishing the tumor.
As if these dreadful findings were not enough, treatment with the drug paclitaxel also doubled the amount of metastasizing cells in the blood, which led to the development of metastases mainly in the lungs.
3 types of chemotherapy that promote cancer metastasis
Paclitaxel is not the only type of chemotherapy that promotes metastasis of cancer to other parts of the body.
Similar effects were also observed with two other chemotherapies commonly used in breast cancer:
- cyclophosphamide
- doxorubicin
Both of these drugs led, similarly to paclitaxel, to increased TMEM activity, as well as a greater number of sites where this occurred and also to an increased number of cancer cells circulating in the blood.
To determine how the results from tests on mice correspond to humans, they took biopsy samples from 20 patients with breast cancer before and after administration of the aforementioned types of chemotherapy.
Findings observed in mice were confirmed in all human patients. Moreover, in 5 patients TMEM activity even increased up to 5-fold!
Conclusion
Unfortunately, after these findings, chemotherapy can hardly be called a cure for cancer.
Although it would be unfair to say that it has no effects, the truth is that most patients are even sicker after it than before.
In addition, chemotherapy brings with it a number of very unpleasant side effects.
Each of us has already heard of symptoms such as nausea or hair loss. New studies, however, bring reports that it also causes brain damage.
One such study from the School of Medicine at Stanford University found that women with breast cancer who underwent chemotherapy had significantly reduced cognitive abilities in the parts of the brain responsible for planning, memory, and logical thinking.
All of this seems to be too high a price for something that, in the end, contributes even more to the spread of cancer instead of treating it.
