Lasting Effects of 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 are going to talk about chemotherapy drugs and their side effects today. Chemotherapy unfortunately with all the good that it does in killing cancer cells can unfortunately cause some lasting side effects. One of those side effects is infertility. In some cases infertility can be permanent as a result of what is called the germ cells or those cells that are responsible for producing sperm or eggs those cells are very sensitive to chemotherapy agents and can be damaged and frequently is the case after, shortly after chemotherapy someone can be infertile for some period of time. The good news is that in most cases that infertility goes away. Lung damage - you can have scarring that occurs in the lung and while many times or most times it is fairly mild it can be permanent. There can also be damage to the heart that may or may not be permanent but when it damages the heart usually it is damaging the muscle and the heart muscle can't contract as hard as it otherwise might. Hearing is a common problem that is a lasting side effect of chemotherapy or certain chemotherapeutic agents for example Cisplatin. Aside from or one of the consequences of permanent hearing loss and nerve damage in the ear is a condition called tinnitus which is essentially a constant ringing or a buzzing or a sensation that you are hearing crickets in the ear and that condition unfortunately is not currently fixable. The good news is that all these side effects while they can happen they don't happen to everybody. Each of these side effects are peculiar to a specific drug, some drugs have more or are more likely to cause these side effects than others and most all of them can be treated. This is Dr. Cathcart talking to you about how drugs, the chemotherapy drugs can have some lasting or permanent side effects."