Deciding if Chemotherapy is Right for You
- Chemotherapy is often an effective treatment option for many women with ovarian cancer, but it does cause side effects
- To be eligible for chemo, a woman needs to be healthy enough to tolerate treatment
- Sometimes, depending on a woman’s age, health, and existing conditions, chemo may do more harm than good
In deciding who is eligible to receive chemotherapy, Dr. Yvette Williams-Brown, a gynecologic oncologist at the LIVESTRONG Cancer Center at UTHealth Austin, says that doctors often consider a few different factors, one of which is a woman’s ability to keep up her day-to-day activities.
Read More “For instance, if someone is debilitated, they may be harmed by the chemotherapy,” Dr. Williams-Brown says. “Then at that point, we decide that chemotherapy could be doing more harm than good.” A woman’s overall health is important to determining the benefit of chemotherapy. Her immune system needs to be strong enough to withstand some of the tougher side effects, including susceptibility to bacteria and infection. Doctors might consider a woman’s age and any existing illnesses or health conditions that may be weakening her immune system. Generally speaking, Dr. Williams-Brown says that if a woman is able to undergo surgery for ovarian cancer, she is likely to be eligible for chemotherapy, too. This is a positive thing, because usually with ovarian cancer treatment, surgery and chemotherapy go hand-in-hand (sometimes women receive chemo before surgery, and sometimes they receive it after surgery).
“It’s very rare that someone is unable to tolerate chemotherapy unless they are very close to the end of their life,” Dr. Williams-Brown says, adding that, in this case, chemotherapy may not be the most helpful course of treatment.
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