Cancer treatments damage immunity 癌症治療損害免疫力

Friday Jan 4, 2019 (jkzx.com) — Conventional cancer treatments are known to damage patients’ immune system. A new study provides some indirect evidence to indicate that cancer treatments indeed reduce the patients’ immune response to previous viral infections.

Specifically, the study shows that many cancer patients after cancer treatments who acquired hepatitis C virus had the virus reactivated and some of them developed hepatitis.

Enrolled in the study were one hundred patients who received cancer treatments between Nov 2012 and July 2016 at a cancer clinic. Viral reactivation was defined as an increase in hepatitis RNA greater than 1 log10 IU/mL and hepatitis was defined as an increase in alanine aminotransferase to equal to or greater than three times the up limit of the normal range.

The study finds that 23% of cancer patients had their hepatitis C virus reactivated. The reactivation rate was higher among patients with blood cancers than patients with solid cancers, 36% versus 10%. High dose steroids were also linked to high rate of virus reactivation (57%).
Among 23 patients with reactivation, 43% or 10 cancer patients had hepatitis flare.

This study along with other studies suggests that cancer patients who have contracted hepatitis C virus should consider the side effects of the conventional cancer treatments. Those who have not ever contracted hepatitis virus still need to consider the risk because the compromised immunity means they cannot fight cancer with their body’s defense system. That is why cancer patients who receive chemotherapy and radiation are more likely to have recurrent cancer and more likely to have cancer metastasis and more likely to die from cancer.

Source

Harrys A. Torres Jeff Hosry Parag Mahale Minas P. Economides Ying Jiang Anna S. Lok, Hepatitis C virus reactivation in patients receiving cancer treatment: A prospective observational study, Hepatology 2018;67:36‐47. First published: 27 June 2017 https://doi.org/10.1002/hep.29344 Cited by: 17