Doctors increasingly acknowledge 'chemo brain'

[bananas]

Source: IHT

On an Internet chat room popular with breast cancer survivors, one thread - called "Where's My Remote?" - turns the mental fog known as chemo brain into a stand-up comedy act.

One woman reported finding five unopened gallons of milk in her refrigerator and having no memory of buying the first four. A second had to ask her husband which toothbrush belonged to her.

<snip>

Once, women complaining of a constellation of symptoms after undergoing chemotherapy - including short-term memory loss, an inability to concentrate, difficulty retrieving words, trouble with multitasking and an overarching sense that they had lost their mental edge - were often sent home with a patronizing "There, there."

But attitudes are changing as a result of a flurry of research and new attention to the aftereffects of life-saving treatment. There is now widespread acknowledgment that patients with cognitive symptoms are not imagining things, and a growing number of oncologists are rushing to offer remedies, including acupuncture and stimulants commonly used for attention-deficit disorder.

<snip>


Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/29/news/chemo.php

[Possumpoint]

1. How Sad

The very treatments used to save lives are stealing some of their quality of life. Cancer is a scourge. We must learn how to defeat it without killing good tissue.

[kimmerspixelated]

4. Exactly!

I can't think of any circumstance that I would undergo chemo. I've seen it have an opposite effect in almost everyone. I would go see a Naturalist first. Switch to a macrobiotic diet and do a cleanse right off the bat.

[Hekate]

6. My late friend Sue did that with her breast cancer. She was gone in a year.

Cancer is a deadly killer and in previous generations was a byword for a horrifically pain-wracked death-sentence.

It's sad that our best treatments today still involve (as one woman put it) "slash, burn, and poison" -- but if undertaken early enough, they usually increase one's life expectancy by many years. So far alternative treatments do not cure cancer at all.

Please don't say what you would "never" do.

Hekate

[SmokingJacket]

14. Same thing happened to my uncle. nt

[Caria]

10. The side effects of chemo can be tough but they are temporary

And worth it!
Caria
Been there. Done that. Still Here.

[donco6]

11. I had it and am fine today.

Maybe you don't know enough people?

[TheWraith]

12. I hope you don't mind dying, then.

Sorry, but naturalists and macrobiotic diets don't do squat against cancer. For every dubious anecdote you hear about somebody miraculously cured their cancer using such things, there's a hundred people who died because they didn't seek proper treatment.

[iamjoy]

13. That's Limited Thinking

I am speaking as a cancer survivor. I had a female cancer. I most certainly WOULD have died without chemo, even though "they" say kind I had has a 100% cure rate now.

The only thing I might have done differently if I'd known how it was all going to turn out was having the hysterectomy in the beginning, or at least the first reccurrence (since the new drugs were probably going to make me infertile anyway). Then I could have avoided all that poison, since I lost my uterus anyway. :(

On the other hand, you may have a point about seeing a naturalist. I wonder if a macrobiotic diet wouldn't help alleviate some of the symptoms of the chemo.

[LeftishBrit]

22. I know many people who owe their lives to chemo

It would be better to come up with far less drastic treatments (chemo is already less bad than 30 years ago, but that's not saying much). But before chemo was available, far fewer people survived. I wouldn't like to have to undergo chemo; but I would if I thought that was the one thing that could save my life.

[Occulus]

19. We're resorting to very novel ways

One is to plant nanospheres of (a metal... I can't recall which at the moment) in the tumor and then douse the tumor with microwaves. Since microwaves and certain metals do not mix well at all :), the tumor gets cooked/incinerated with minimal damage to the surrounding tissue.

Other efforts involve turning on the tumor cells' 'suicide gene', causing the tumors to kill themselves because the cell thinks it's 'bad' (well, it is bad, right?).

We're going to have to get very creative to solve all forms of cancer, but with the human genome finally completely mapped, we can and are going toward that goal in earnest. Fifty years from now, it's completely conceivable that cancer could be solved by a pill. Wouldn't that be fantastic...

[applegrove]

2. What a shame.

[Straight Shooter]

3. Sounds like the same kind of blackout fugue that heavy drinkers sometimes experience.

The brain is a very strange thing. I'm sure at the time those gallons of milk were purchased, this woman was perfectly cognizant of what she was doing.

It's a double whammy when "mental fog" is coupled with a very elderly person who has chemotherapy. I don't know how they would begin to treat something like that, when you can't differentiate between normal memory impairment (data overload in the brain) and what's caused by chemo. :shrug:

Hard to believe that so many afflictions are dismissed as "imagining things."

[bemildred]

5. Who knew that poisons would poison you anyway? nt

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

9. That problem, in drinkers...

Is caused by depletion of Vitamin B6.

Hmmm...I wonder...

[Straight Shooter]

17. Fascinating.

B vitamins are critical to all sorts of physiological and mental functions. I didn't realize the fugue state induced by heavy drinking was a result of depletion of B6.

I wonder if the chemo affects the absorption of B6, needless to mention other vital nutrients for cognitive functioning.

[MsKandice01]

7. My co-worker suffers from this...

And the frustration she feels is quite obvious. I feel so bad for her.

[Hekate]

8. It's good that docs are finally listening.I wish Mom's had told her about this...

My mother got breast cancer at 75 or 76, and survived until 82. She was mortally distressed by her brain-fog, and was sure it meant she was going senile. Given her personality, she also didn't want to hear from me that I had read about this symptom and that it would pass -- because her *doctor* had not told her to expect this, and her own research had not brought this up.

I think it would have helped my mother a lot if her oncologist had brought it up and assured her that it was a well-known side effect and would pass in time. Because of her fears about losing her mind, she would have rather died than bring it up herself.

In my mother's case, it's hard to know because she had so many other medical issues piling on, and a cardiologist talked her into having heart surgery at 80 -- which in my opinion was a really unnecessary assault on her system. :-(

Hekate

[Rene]

15. Mental fog...not only from chemo.....also from bypass/open heart surgery

My son suffers from memory loss and brain fog quite a lot, after undergoing open heart surgery and being on a bypass machine 5 years ago. Dr's NEVER told him it could/would happen, before or after the surgery. They've never mentioned it to him until he asked. He found out thru his own research and talking to other patients in the Mended Hearts organization.

[deadmessengers]

16. My mom had that

She had a quad bypass 15 years ago at the age of 50, and we all noticed a distinct decline in her mental abilities afterwards. The most striking moment came a few years ago, when my mother couldn't remember that I had ever attended college (I went to night school for 2 years while living with her).

[Hekate]

18. OMG. So we were right about my Mom all along: she never rebounded from the heart surgery

See my post #8 above.

The cardiologist and cardiac surgeon were both very pleased with her recovery -- that is, her scar looked great and her heart sounded good.

BUT she shortly came down with rheumatoid arthritis (why?!?) and her mental state went from bad to worse. She really lost it, and her last two years were awful for her and all of us.

We all knew on some level that it was the damn triple bypass/valve replacement at age 80 that did it, but just try to get a doctor to agree with that. :-(

Heart failure would have been merciful.

Hekate

[Tracer]

20. Not all doctors deny "chemo brain"!

That was one of the side effects that my oncologist warned me might happen.

And it did.

I was a voracious reader --- and I found that I couldn't read more than 3 or 4 pages of a book without drifting off into space. At the time (a year and a half ago) I just thought that the books I had chosen from the library were just plain boring.

I'm happy to report that the "fog" of chemo brain has gone away and I feel as sharp as I ever did.

(The cancer has gone away too.)

[BluePatriot]

21. Minor threadjack but somewhat related:

Ah, the patronizing "there, there" with the "psychosomatic" implications. What woman HASN'T heard that one and left with no relief for her very real symptoms?

:mad:

Freakin' docs that think they know everything. Glad we can all still take alternative remedies and vitamin supplements to deal with things our doctors blow off and achieve much needed, cheaper relief. Oh, wait:

http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7185

"The FDA has been known to use legal maneuvering to try to end your access to natural health products (like vitamins, minerals and herbs) and natural health therapies of all sorts. We believe they are at it again. This time, their ploy is to issue a "Guidance" that implies these therapies can be "Medicine," which creates the risk that any non-physician who uses them could be held to be practicing medicine without a license. Since these practices could be considered "Medicine" any products intended for such use could be considered untested drugs and could therefore be forbidden."

So, a kind request: If you have ever sought out alt. remedies as I have due to side effects from "prescription drugs" or docs generally not believing you have problems at all, like they are apt to do with "women that complain," kindly sign the above petition to keep the FDA from mucking around with the supplement industry. While, of course, YMMV with alternative medicine, needless suffering due to the brushoff by know-it-all doctors, Big Pharma, and lawmakers really pisses me off. I know many cancer patients give alt. remedies a shot and they deserve the continued opportunity.

End rant.

[Eurobabe]

23. I would humbly suggest that docs look to the thyroid

doesn't it get poisoned during this process?

One of the hallmarks of hypothyroidism (underfunction) is brain-fog.