Side Effects Of Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is a sort of treatment based on various combinations of drugs that are meant to reduce the growth of cancerous cells within a patient’s body. Many side effects of chemotherapy treatments are permanently reported by people undergoing a chemical intervention.
Hair loss or alopecia is one of the side effects of chemotherapy although it is false to assume that someone suffering from thinning hair or alopecia is necessarily ill with cancer. How is chemotherapy hair loss explained? Well, chemotherapy is a treatment based on very powerful medication that inhibits and destroys cells with a rapid growth rate.
The trouble is that the treatment is directed towards all the cells in the body that have this characteristic disregarding whether they are cancer cells or healthy cells. Thus, besides hair loss, other side effects of chemotherapy administration include skin decay and digestive problems, because both hair and soft membranes are constantly renewing themselves.
long term side effects of chemotherapy
Even if this is one of the side effects of chemotherapy that most of us know something about, few really have a clue about the temporary nature of such side effects. At the end of the treatment the hair follicles will resume normal functionality. After a while, hair will start growing back but its texture and color may be a bit different from what you were used to having before.
True, there are pretty many side effects of chemotherapy and researchers have been doing their best to find ways of preventing them from happening or at least reducing them. You can prevent hair loss for instance by putting some cold compresses on the scalp and thus reduce the blood circulation in the area. As a result, the blood will not carry the drug to the hair follicles and this means that one’s hair will be protected from the damage of the drug.
All in all, side effects of chemotherapy remain numerous and scientists do their best to discover ways to reduce them. Even if one solution to preventing side effects from appearing is available, the same solution may not work for another drug that leads to the same problem. This means that you may be able to fight against alopecia because some drugs are more gentle with hair follicles, but this is not the case with all medications.