Chemotherapy and Hair Loss

Chemotherapy Overview

Chemotherapy is a course of treatment with strong medications. It’s used to treat cancer by reducing tumor size, stopping cancer cells from dividing or by inhibiting the spreading of cancer to other parts of the body, a process known as metastasis.

Ways Chemotherapy Attacks Cancer

Chemotherapy drugs fall into four different broad categories.

• Chemo medications such as chlorambucil and cyclophosphamide are alkylating agents. These drugs work in the DNA of the cells where they are able to kill the cells at various stages of a cell’s life cycle.
• Other chemotherapy agents pretend to be proteins that cancer cells need to consume to live. When the cancer cells are tricked into “eating” these chemo drugs, known as antimetabolites, the cancer cells starve because they receive no benefit from eating the fake protein.
• Chemotherapy drugs such as doxorubicin are plant alkaloids. These drugs stop the cancer cells from dividing.
• The fourth category of chemo agents consists of antitumor antibiotics, which are not the same as the antibiotics prescribed to treat infections. Doxorubicin and mitoxantrone are examples of antitumor antibiotics that work by binding directly with the DNA in cancer cells, which stops the cells from reproducing.

Temporary Hair Loss from Chemotherapy

In the human body, the hair follicles produce quickly dividing cells to grow hair. Chemotherapy drugs don’t have a way to “see” the difference between fast-growing cancer cells and fast-growing hair cells, which means chemo plays it safe by killing them all. The result is a loss of hair on the scalp, and sometimes loss of eyelashes, eyebrows, armpit hair, pubic hair and other body hair.

When hair falls out due to chemo treatments, the hair may fall out in clumps or may gradually thin. This generally begins two to four weeks after starting treatment and continues until a few weeks after treatment has ceased.

Problems with Post Chemotherapy Hair Growth

Taxotere is a very potent chemotherapy drug that can cause some patients to have long-term or even permanent hair loss.

Approved to treat breast cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, advanced stomach cancer, head and neck cancer and metastatic prostate cancer, Taxotere is given intravenously. Even though some chemo medications are available in pill form, no pill form exists at this time for Taxotere.

According to a 2013 study in the U.K. by The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, perhaps 15 percent of Taxotere patients suffer from permanent hair loss. Researchers found that 21 out of 134 women who answered questionnaires said they were suffering from permanent hair loss on their heads.

Taxotere maker Sanofi-Aventis has said only three percent of patients are apt to experience long-term hair loss. Sanofi-Aventis also allegedly warned patients in Europe and Canada that permanent hair loss was a possibility as far back as 2005, but no similar warnings appeared on U.S. packaging until 2015.

These claims have led to an enormous amount of litigation over the link between Taxotere and permanent hair loss. Cancer survivors say their hair has failed to regrow long after their Taxotere chemotherapy ended. Many say that while they expected some temporary hair loss from chemotherapy, they would have chosen a different chemotherapy drug if they had been adequately warned that Taxotere could cause permanent hair loss.