Common Side Effects of Cisplatin Chemotherapy

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Dr. David Cathcart. I'm a family practice physician from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph and we're going to talk about chemotherapy drugs and their side effects today. Cisplatin is one of several chemotherapeutic agents. In fact probably one of about 50 different agents that are fairly commonly used. Cisplatin is probably more, one of the more commonly used of those 50 agents. It has some pretty significant side effects, however and nausea and vomiting are probably the most common. In addition it can cause some damage to the kidneys and the damage could be permanent. It also tends to cause damage to the nervous system. We are talking about when I say nervous systems, specifically talking about nerves and the very small fine nerves. Those include not only the nerves in the hands and feet which that condition is called peripheral neuropathy but also includes those very small nerves inside the inner ear that affect hearing and so it can cause some permanent hearing loss and in fact if it does cause that it tends to, the resulting condition that most people have with that is a condition called tinnitus which is a sensation of ringing in your ears or crickets or some noise. So Cisplatin while it is a common agent and a common chemotherapy agent and fairly effective it does have some significant side effects and one way that doctors use to try and reduce those side effects is to add Cisplatin in combination with other medications that tend, so that you can give a lower dose of Cisplatin thereby reducing some of its more serious side effects. This is Dr. Cathcart talking to you about the side effects of Cisplatin."