Hi! my dear steemian friends, welcome to my second episode on medical series, today we will be talking about chemotherapy and how it affects our body.
As you might have heard about chemotherapy or your relatives of friends who have gone through this treatment to treat cancer. foremost we need to know what is a cancer, its treatment and then we shall know about the hair loss during chemotherapy.
What is cancer??
First of all i will tell you about cancer in briefly. During the process of cell-growth and cell division some of the cells undergoes mutation i.e change in the DNA sequence and these cells continue to grow rapidly and invade the surrounding tissues. These mutated cells with rapidly multiplying ability are cancer cells. First these cells are localised(stage 1 cancer) then they invade surrounding tissues/organs(stage 2 cancer) and at late stage they affect the whole body(stage 3 cancer). These cancer cells or mutated cells spread via blood or lymphatics(part of circulatory system transporting white blood cells)
Image credit - pixabay
What are the treatments??
If someone is diagnosed with cancer they are left with three options of treatment - surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
If the cancer is localised and hasn't invaded other tissues then a surgical treatment is done. And if the cancer has invaded surrounding tissues or an entire organ such as in lung cancer then the treatment is radiation followed by chemo. But what if the cancer has spread throughout your body such as in leukaemia ??? In such cases chemotherapy is the best way.
Image credit - pixabay.com
So what is chemotherapy??
Chemotherapy is use of drugs to treat cancer also known as chemo in short. These drugs can kill the cancer cells throughout the body. The drugs used are : Methotrexate, Cyclophosphamide, capecitabine and many other drugs are used in combination to treat cancer.
Then why do we have hairloss while chemotherapy?
First we must know how does these drugs attack the cancer cells. Actually the chemo drugs doesn't know which is a healthy cell or a cancer cell and affects whole body. Its mechanism of action is to attack rapidly growing cells ( tumour or cancer cells). As we have learned earlier that cancer cells divide rapidly so during chemo the drugs attack the cells which are multiplying and kill them during cell division. During the time of cell division/replication the drugs inhibit topoisomerase - II enzyme which is required for cell division. So every time a cell divides it open itself for an attack. So the more the cancer cell divides the more likely they are dead.
Now talking about the hair loss, hair cells also divide rapidly and frequently. In the process of chemotherapy the dugs will affect the healthy cells too. They can't tell if its cancer cells or normal cell. And the rapidly growing and dividing cells like hair cells, skin and gut wall cells are also affected. The growth of the hair cells are also arrested and hair starts to fall.
The hair cells gets hit the hardest. And the hair loss are temporary. It starts growing back when the chemo is stopped.
Are there other side effects like hair fall during chemo?
As chemo affects rapidly dividing cells like skin cells and gut cells (stomach and intestine cells) they can cause skin rashes, itching, nausea, vomiting, pain weight loss and fatigue too.
And my best wishes to patients under chemotherapy treatment...
Thank you !!!
And If you want to know about breast cancer (in U.S 1 out of 8 females can have breast cancer) wait until my next post on steemit !!
Reference links - 1, 2 , 3, 4.