Health Question - Chemo treatment.

OldGoat

Kind of a strange one here.
Someone has liver problems and is on the waiting list for a transplant. He has bileduct cancer (CCA) and is undergoing chemo to treat that. Now he's noticed a possible side effect of the treatment. A mole on his leg is starting to shrink - or more exactly the centre of it is starting to dissapear leaving looking like an atoll. So I'd like to know if having chemo for CCA is likely to cause the reduction of (undiagnosed) skin moles?

r3nu4l

Moved from tGC. HS mods, your choice as to what to do with it

OldGoat

Mods, feel free to delete or remove the post if it's causing any issues.


Allow me to rephrase my question to clarify things a bit...
Does the treatment (chemo) for one cancer also fight other cancers that might be as yet undetected in your body or is chemo targeted specifically at the known site.

r3nu4l

OldGoat wrote: »

Mods, feel free to delete or remove the post if it's causing any issues.


Allow me to rephrase my question to clarify things a bit...
Does the treatment (chemo) for one cancer also fight other cancers that might be as yet undetected in your body or is chemo targeted specifically at the known site.

That's a very difficult one to answer to be honest. It all depends on the cancer(s) and agent(s) used to treat. Some cancers share very common mutations in molecular pathways and it is possible that some drugs targetted towards one cancer could also attack another (as yet) undetected cancer.

However, not all chemotherapy drugs will do this for all cancers. That's a very vague answer but it's about as much as I can say without knowing the exact agents in use. Your best bet would be Google but to be honest, there's so much misinformation out there that in reality, talking to the oncologist is really the best bet

OldGoat

Seeing his own specilists was the first thing I told him to do and he's doing that but the idea tweeked my 'inquisitive' button. I am taken with the idea of finding a fringe benefit to his treatments - a bit of positive news for him.
I did the google thing and like you say I was bamboozeled by the amount of (mis)information out there. Even using the specific name of the reagents in the websearch did little to narrow the scope.

Sitric

If you don´t have access to journals, stick ´emedicine´ onto the end of your google searches. Lot of good information on that site.

DrIndy

Before jumping the gun here and presume his skin lesion is indeed a malignant melanoma - it may in fact be something else entirely and be completely benign.

Older people get "liver spots" which come and go.

In general - melanoma is sadly virtually untreatable and thus it makes any response from chemo unlikely and hence this lesion being actually a melanoma. Chat to the doctor and ask them what they think it is.