Chemotherapy Warning: Cancer-Related Drugs Causing Deaths

Patients should be warned about the dangers of chemotherapy after research showed that cancer drugs are killing up to 50 per cent of patients in some UK hospitals.

For the first time researchers looked at the numbers of cancer patients who died within 30 days of starting chemotherapy, which indicates that the medication is the cause of death, rather than the cancer.

The study by Public Health England and Cancer Research UK found that across England around 8.4 per cent of patients with lung cancer, and 2.4 per cent of breast cancer patients died within a month.

But in some hospitals the figure was far higher. In Milton Keynes the death rate for lung cancer treatment was 50.9 per cent, although it was based on a very small number of patients.

Read more detail about the research and hospitals involved here.

Public Health England (PHE), said it had contacted the hospitals concerned to ask them to review practices.

Dr Jem Rashbass, Cancer Lead for PHE, said: "Chemotherapy is a vital part of cancer treatment and is a large reason behind the improved survival rates over last four decades.

"However, it is powerful medication with significant side effects and often getting the balance right on which patients to treat aggressively can be hard.

"Those hospitals whose death rates are outside the expected range have had the findings shared with them and we have asked them to review their practice and data."

The study looked at more than 23,000 women with breast cancer and nearly 10,000 men with 9634 non-small cell lung cancer who underwent chemotherapy in 2014. Of those treated 1,383 died within 30 days.

Chemotherapy is toxic for the body because it does not discriminate between health and cancerous cells.

The researchers also found that there were significant differences in survival for older people and those in poorer health. They advised doctors to be more careful in selecting patients for treatment where it could do more harm than good.

Read the full article at nzherald.co.nz