Chemotherapy – cancer treatment and side effects

The importance of Chemotherapy Dose

Chemotherapy refers to the treatment of cancer and other disease with chemicals that kill cells. Most chemotherapy drugs can’t differentiate between healthy and malignant cells. Because these drugs are toxic, it is very important to calculate each chemotherapy dose given to a patient carefully.

Further complicating giving a chemotherapy dose is complex delivery systems. In order to speed the chemicals into the patient’s body a pump is often used, which is connected either to an IV or port line. The chemotherapy dose is then calculated by how much of a drug is pumped into the patient’s system per minute. It’s very important this calculation is done properly since if too little of a drug is given the therapy will be ineffective, and too much can be seriously harmful to the patient.

According to an article in Bio-Medicine this was the case when a 43-year-old woman in Alberta Canada was given too high a dose via a miscalculated pump. The woman accidentally received a 4 day chemotherapy dose in the space of 4 hours through the incorrectly programmed drug-administering pump. Reference: (http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news/Overdose-of-Chemotherapy-Drug-kills-a-woman-13776-1/)

She was given 5,000 mg of the chemotherapy drug 5-FU during too short a space of time. This chemotherapy dose was extremely high and this type of drug was so powerful that too many of her healthy cells were damaged in the process.

There is no antidote for this class of drug, and she passed away from organ failure within a few days of the mishap.
Of course, this isn’t the usual outcome of chemotherapy as it can prolong life and in many cases stop the recurrence of many different types of cancer for long periods of time. As stated earlier a chemotherapy dose is usually delivered intravenously. In some cases, isolated limb perfusion or isolated infusion chemotherapy is used.

The main purpose of isolating a limb or organ is to deliver a powerful chemotherapy dose to one specific area or tumor site thus avoiding overwhelming systemic damage to the rest of the patient’s body. Whatever the treatment plan or delivery system it’s very important that the chemotherapy dose be calculated by a trained medical professional.