Women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer often face many side effects. One, called neuropathy, can be extremely painful and research shows Black women are more likely to experience it. Now, doctors are finding ways to decrease that risk.
Saysha Wright is a busy mother of two.
“I’m a football mom, a cheerleading mom,” she said.
She’s also a breast cancer survivor. In 2019, at just 31 years old.
“I found a lump,” Saysha recalled.
She had stage two breast cancer. She started chemotherapy and after a couple treatments, she developed neuropathy… a side effect that causes numbness, tingling, and pain in the hands and feet.
“I couldn’t feel my fingertips or my toes. So when I would try to braid my baby’s hair or button up my kids’, you know, clothes, I couldn’t. I had no feeling whatsoever,” she explained.
“Neuropathy is a tough side effect,” said Bryan Schneider, MD, Vera Bradley Professor of Oncology at the IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center.
He says anyone can experience it during chemotherapy, but the risk is “substantially” higher in Black women.
“We’ve been on a decade-long mission to try to understand why that is,” Dr. Schneider said.
He led a clinical study of Black women with breast cancer who were undergoing treatment to see if there was a way to reduce the risk of neuropathy.
“And what we found, fortunately, was that one of the drugs, a commonly used drug called Taxotere or Docetaxel, has significantly less neuropathy in this population,” Dr. Schneider explained.
Doctor Schneider says this is a huge step in improving treatment and life after treatment. Because for some women, once they develop neuropathy, it never goes away. Fortunately, Saysha recovered from her neuropathy and she’s four years in remission.
“Just fight. Don’t give up,” she stated.
Dr. Schneider says this drug can bring on many other side effects, so it requires an important conversation between the doctor and patient. But when the risk of neuropathy is high, preventing that usually trumps all the other side effects.
