From the first moment my wife discovered
she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even
ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have
received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than
mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started
this blog…
My wife got sick
this week.
REALLY sick! I
won’t go into the nasty details, but I will note a comment she made: “I haven’t
been this sick since before chemo started!”
That got me to
thinking. I know I’ve commented on this before here: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/12/chemo-killed-coldsand-other-weird.html
That was a year
and a half ago, so I decided to see if anything has changed in the intervening
months.
It turns out
that chemo itself may boost the immune system: “…new research published online
on April 4 in the Cell Press journal Immunity shows that effective
chemotherapies actually work by mobilizing the body's own immune cells to fight
cancer.”
When the chemo –
targeted for particular kinds of cancer cells – smashes the cancer, the destroyed
cells break up and the bits and pieces of a protein called ATP (adenosine
tri-phosphate) start to float through the bloodstream. When the body’s cells
pick it up, they mobilize and start to create anti-bodies against that
particular kind of ATP. That kind of ATP is only found in the cancer cells, so
the body itself begins to fight back!
Neulasta, which
stimulates the growth of white blood cells in bone marrow, “super-charges” the
body and pretty soon, you have a mobile force attacking the cancer cells.
While the Center
for Disease Control in Atlanta strongly urges post-cancer folks to get the
vaccine against seasonal influenza because of weakened immune systems, they don’t
really give any hints at the subject of my curiosity…
So – the question
remains: does the LOSS of chemotherapy expose a patient to infection by more “usual”
illnesses? I still can’t find any research to support my thoughts, and while it
seems logical that this would be true, it remains to become the research topic
of some clinic somewhere. I’ll keep you all posted.
Resource:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404122048.htm,
http://www.cell.com/immunity/retrieve/pii/S1074761313001386
Image: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/rAxNwvR-1f4/hqdefault.jpg
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