• Question: Is/will there be chemotherapy where you don't lose all your hair?

    Asked by paige to RobB, Kylie, Matt, Bex, Sam on 13 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Matt Dunn

      Matt Dunn answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      Hi Paige,

      Chemotherapy is a serious treatment, which essentially tries to kill the cancer cells but also kills a lot of your healthy cells too. This is why you can lose hair and muscle and other cells depending on the type of cancer when you undergo chemo treatment.

      What is required is an easy way to tell the difference between cancers and normal cells, and then a way to selectively remove the cancer. This may not be possible for chemotherapies, which is more like a huge bomb that affects the whole area, but might be possible for something more precise, such as a targeted therapy.

    • Photo: Kylie Belchamber

      Kylie Belchamber answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      I’m not sure about chemotherapy, as it is so damaging. it will kill any cell the divides a lot, so that is why you lose your hair.
      I think we will soon move away from using chemotherapy, and start using other drugs, like immunotherapy which retrains your immune system to attack the cancer. if we can get this to work, then it will only attack the cancer cells, and not your hair! And has less side effects too, which is great!

    • Photo: Rob Brass

      Rob Brass answered on 22 Jun 2016:

      Hi paige,

      As kylie said chemotherapy drugs are designed to attack rapidly dividing cells and so as well as attacking the tumour they often also attack hair cells and other bits too! A lot of work is currently going into immunotherapy, this is where we use drugs to teach your body’s own defences to attack the tumour. This looks like it could be really successful from the results so far, it also has less side effects than chemo! 🙂

Comments