How often does someone who’s been treated for cancer experience nerve pain? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Nerve pain, or neuropathy, can be a big problem for some people who’ve been treated for cancer, with a new study showing just how big a problem it is. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, describes the study.

Nelson: They looked at what fraction of folks had chronic painful neuropathy as a result of their chemotherapy within a little bit greater than three months after their chemotherapy treatment. More than 10,000 patients, it's something on the order of 41 percent or more suffered this kind of a syndrome. May be related to which diseases were captured in those studies, which chemotherapy agents were used. Taxanes which we know are associated with peripheral neuropathy and platinum type drugs may be more likely to trigger these kinds of problems.   :34

The study also revealed that those folks with lung cancer experienced persistent neuropathy most often among types of cancer treated. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.