Global Health Asia-Pacific September 2020 September 2020 | Page 28
Cancer News
Is chemotherapy less
effective in obese women?
The efficacy of a common cancer drug may vary based on
body size
An analysis of a past clinical trial found that the chemotherapeutic
drug docetaxel could have fewer benefits for obese and overweight
women than leaner ones.
Researchers from Belgium and Italy sifted through the data of
2,800 breast cancer patients who were treated with several types
of chemotherapy including docetaxel, one of the most used cancer
medicines in the world. They noticed that obese and overweight women
who received the popular chemotherapy had worse outcomes in terms
of death and relapse than their slimmer peers.
�ody weight made no difference, however, among the women who
didn’t take docetaxel.
“Docetaxel is a lipophilic drug, suggesting that fat present in the
body could absorb part of the drug before it can reach the tumour,”
explained Professor Christine Desmedt, one of the study authors and
head of the KU Leuven Laboratory for Translational Breast Cancer
Research, in a press release.
Obesity is already recognised as a risk factor for breast cancer
among women, and obese patients with breast cancer have an added
risk of relapsing compared with thinner ones.
“More research is needed before changes in treatment can be
implemented. Patients who have concerns about docetaxel can discuss
these with their doctor,” said Professor Desmedt.
These preliminary results should spur researchers into analysing
the effects of docetaxel on obese and overweight cancer patients and
whether the e�cacy of similar chemotherapies is in�uenced by patients’
body size.
�If follow-up research confirms that this finding is solely related to the
pharmacological characteristics of docetaxel, this might also apply to
patients with other cancer types that are treated with docetaxel, such
as prostate or lung cancer. These results also make us wonder whether
other chemotherapy drugs from the same family, like paclitaxel, will
show the same effect,� she said.
Blood platelet count
could presage cancer
Even people within the normal range might be at
risk
T
he study looked at the records of nearly 300,000
patients with platelet numbers at the higher end
of the normal range and found that this cohort had a
significantly higher risk of developing a malignancy,
especially lung and colorectal cancers.
“Updating guidance for GPs to investigate higher
platelet counts could save lives. This is particularly
important in a post-COVID era; clues to help GPs
identify cancer earlier are crucial to target the backlog
in cancer investigation and diagnosis,” said Dr Sarah
Bailey, the senior research fellow at the University of
Exeter Medical School who led the research, in a press
release.
Her concern, as well as those of other doctors, is that
due to the pandemic, people are avoiding visits to their
doctors, resulting in a decline in the number of cancer
cases being detected.
“Fear of contracting the coronavirus in health
care settings has dissuaded people from screening,
diagnosis, and treatment for non-COVID-19 diseases.
The consequences for cancer outcomes, for example,
could be substantial,” wrote Dr Norman E. Sharpless,
the director of the US National Cancer Institute, in a June
editorial published in Science, noting that in the US this
delay is estimated to contribute to almost 10,000 excess
deaths from breast and colorectal cancers in the next
decade.
26 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2020 GlobalHealthAsiaPacific.com