US Pharm. 2011;36(Oncology/Hematology suppl):14.
Oxaliplatin, a platinum-based anticancer drug used to treat colorectal cancer, appears to cause nerve damage that worsens months after treatment ends and may be permanent. The side effect, described by Johns Hopkins researchers in the September issue of Neurology, was discovered in what is believed to be the first effort to track oxaliplatin-based nerve damage through relatively inexpensive and convenient punch skin biopsies. The researchers saw that nerve cells' long extensions, called axons, degenerated over the course of oxaliplatin therapy and continued to degenerate after treatment stopped.
Many patients who take oxaliplatin report bothersome neurologic side effects, including pain in the hands and feet and a numbness or tingling in the throat that affects swallowing. The investigators emphasize that the drug therapy clearly improves length of survival in advanced cancer by months to years, and that the goal of their new study is to find ways of preventing or slowing the damage through nerve-protective therapies identified through simple skin testing.
