Health Consciousness
Originally Published: January 11, 2018
No matter how much doctors push the treatment, chemotherapy might not be the best option in the fight against cancer, as a new study shows up to 50 percent of patients are killed by the drugs — not the disease, itself.
Researchers from Public Health England and Cancer Research UK performed a groundbreaking studyexamining for the first time the numbers of cancer patients who died within 30 days of beginning chemotherapy — indicating the treatment, not the cancer, was the cause of death.
Looking at those death rates in hospitals across the U.K., researchers found an alarming mortality rate associated with chemotherapy.
Across “England around 8.4 per cent of patients with lung cancer, and 2.4 per cent of breast cancer patients died within a month,” the Telegraph reported.
“But in some hospitals the figure was far higher. In Milton Keynes the death rate for lung cancer treatment was 50.9 per cent, although it was based on a very small number of patients.”
Alarmingly, the one-month mortality rate at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals for those undergoing palliative, rather than curative, chemotherapy for lung cancer was a full 28 percent. One in five breast cancer patients receiving palliative care at Cambridge University Hospitals died from treatment.
In certain areas — Blackpool, Coventry, Derby, South Tyneside, and Surrey and Sussex — deaths of lung cancer patients by chemotherapy were ‘far higher’ than the national average.
Dr. Jem Rashbass, Cancer Lead for Public Health England — the national health care service, which requested the study — said, as quoted by the Telegraph:
“Chemotherapy is a vital part of cancer treatment and is a large reason behind the improved survival rates over the last four decades.
“However, it is powerful medication with significant side effects and often getting the balance right on which patients to treat aggressively can be hard.
“Those hospitals whose death rates are outside the expected range have had the findings shared with them and we have asked them to review their practice and data.”
For the analysis, researchers “included all women with breast cancer and all men and women with lung cancer residing in England, who were 24 years or older and who started a cycle” of chemotherapy in 2014.
Long the mainstay for treating various cancers, chemotherapy has finally drawn criticism in recent years, as the medicine does not differentiate between healthy and cancerous cells. Now, this study — published in the Lancet — shows how that powerful cell-destroying property can mean the demise for patients as well.
Researchers have advised physicians to exercise more caution in vetting which patients should ideally receive chemotherapy. Older and more infirm patients, in particular, might be better off without receiving palliative care, which is designed to offer relief instead of curing the disease.
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