Tracking Chemotherapy’s Effects on Secondary Cancers

 Blogger's Note: the fact that secondary cancers arise from chemotherapy treatments is not new; search blog/medline etc for "treatment related second primary cancers" (or similar phrase)

abstract

"Certain chemotherapies, including anthracyclines for breast cancer and topoisomerase inhibitors for leukemia, raise the risk of secondary cancers, particularly acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The treatments kill cancer cells by damaging DNA but may also cause hidden, latent damage to the DNA of normal cells, which may eventually cause new cancers. New research indicates that cancer patients receiving chemotherapy are nearly five times as likely as the general population to be diagnosed with treatment-related AML (t-AML), a risk especially high in the first 5 years after treatment with alkylating drugs (or radiation) but that may develop up to 10 years afterward.

“As well as finding significant variation in AML rates over 30 years, we found that chemotherapy alone may raise the risk of secondary cancers, which we previously thought applied only to radiation,” said Lindsay Morton, Ph.D., primary author of the study (Blood, Feb. 14, 2013) and investigator at the National Cancer Institute’s division of cancer epidemiology and genetics. Among 426,068 study patients drawn from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma accounted for the greatest increase in AML, followed by myeloma.

“We also found that since 2000, treatment-related secondary cancers increased among esophageal, cervical, and prostate cancer patients, and since the 1990s, in bone,joint and endometrial cancers,” said Morton. Risk of t-AML, which is extremely difficult to treat, or other secondary cancers should be calculated into all treatment decisions, Morton said.

“This is the first research since the 1980s to document treatment changes and risk of AML over time in a large cohort of patients,” said Margaret Tucker, M.D., director of the human genetics program and acting director of the division of cancer …(requires paid subscription to continue reading)