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>>>Dr. Margileth: As chemotherapy has improved over the past 5 or 10 years, one of the most
important improvements has been in the control of nausea and vomiting. We now have very good
medicine such as intravenous Emend or intravenous Aloxi, that for the vast majority of patients
control the nausea and vomiting very very well. In many breast cancer patients, given
this type of aggressive anti-nausea management vomiting may never occur and they may have
minimal or no nausea, so that in the past 10 years nausea and vomiting certainly in
my practice has become much less of an issue.
Unfortunately, there are still a few people certainly less than 5% patients that no matter
what we do they seem to have persistent vomiting. One can change the anti-nausea medicines or
if they does not work, one is ultimately pushed to do a different chemotherapy that we would
hope would be as effective but use drug that are less common to cause nausea and vomiting.
One of the regimens that we have gone to sometimes is a regimen of weekly Taxol for patients
who have a lot of vomiting, and that is a regimen that is very well tolerated but the
first thing I would suggest is to be more aggressive in the choice of intravenous and
oral anti-nausea medications.
The other issue of diarrhea is not a real common issue with chemotherapy but it can
be an issue with the class of drugs known as Taxanes such as Taxotere and Taxol. They
can actually rarely cause some severe abdominal problems and this has to be watched for very
carefully.
The other issue is that if a patient has persistent diarrhea, one starts to look for other causes
of that diarrhea and one of the issues would be to do a stool culture for an organism called
C. difficile that can cause persistent and uncontrollable diarrhea that can result in
dehydration and sometimes hospitalization.
For the most part, most patients do not have any major vomiting or major diarrhea but when
these do occur in general we have things to do that will control them.
Hi, I am Dr. Jay Harness and I want to share with you an important information that I believe
that every newly diagnosed patient with breast cancer needs to know.
Susan Denver: “I am a breast cancer survivor.”
Katherine Stockton: “I am a breast cancer survivor.”
Coree: “I am a breast cancer survivor…”
Susan Denver: “…and I want every woman to know…”
Katherine Stockton: “…about personalized breast cancer treatment…”
Susan Denver: “…and the Genomic Test.”
Coree: “A test that helps guide a woman and her doctor…”
Katherine Stockton: “…to the best treatment options for her.”
Susan Denver: “Pass it on!”