Chemo’s tough on young, too

WASHINGTON – Younger breast cancer patients seem to suffer more serious side effects from chemotherapy than previously thought.

Roughly one in six of those women wind up at the emergency room or hospitalized because of such side effects as infection, low blood counts, dehydration or nausea, researchers reported Tuesday.

Some of the side effects occurred at rates three to four times higher than earlier research had predicted.

Tuesday’s study marks the first attempt to assess the real-world risks of chemotherapy for some 35,000 breast cancer patients under age 64 who get the drugs each year.

Many breast cancer patients don’t need chemotherapy in the first place; surgery, radiation and hormone treatment are enough. But doctors don’t always have an easy way to tell who would benefit from chemo on top of all that.

And for women in the to-treat-or-not gray zone, age sometimes is the deciding factor because those under 64 are thought to tolerate chemotherapy better than older women.

“We don’t believe our study is saying that chemotherapy is not helpful,” said Dr. Michael Hassett of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who led the research, published in Tuesday’s Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

But, “we’ve been struggling as a professional community to understand which women benefit from chemotherapy,” he said.