How does Cancer Treatments Damage the Immune System?

Cancer treatments are physically difficult. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and cancer drugs may take a toll on the body that results in critical side effects. These treatments and side effects may also compromise or drain the immune system at a time when your body may need it to perform efficiently. As critical as these cancer treatments are, it’s also critical to understand how, in some cases, they may mutilation the immune system.

Different Cancer Treatments & Their Impacts

As cancer treatments attack the disease in several ways, they may also upset the immune system in many ways. For example:

Surgery- Particularly, major surgery, may put a jinx on the immune system, tiring its reserves to help prevent infection and heal wounds caused by this same procedure. Surgery requires cutting through the skin and layers of tissue, which may uncover the body to germs. Also, surgeons may be required to eradicate lymph nodes, which help combat infection.

Chemotherapy – Chemotherapy medicines are intended to kill fast-growing cells like most cancer cells are. However, chemotherapy may also outbreak fast-growing hale and hearty cells, such as those found in bone marrow, which enhances immune cells, obstructing their ability to safeguard you from diseases, microorganisms, and other threats.

Immunotherapy – Immunotherapy drugs are called checkpoint inhibitors and this is aimed to lift the immune system by helping them to recognize and combat cancer cells. But, in some cases, an intense immune system may attack healthy cells and cause flu-like symptoms or possibly solemn autoimmune conditions, such as colitis.    

Radiation Therapy- Radiation Therapy works by uncovering cancer cells to ionizing waves of energy that slay the cells or stunt their enhancement. While damaging or destroying cancer cells, the treatment may also damage healthy cells and subsidize conditions that may lead to an enhanced risk of toxicity.

Stem Cell Transplants – This procedure replaces your immune cells with your own healthy cells or with those from stem-cell donors. This therapy often needs intense regimens of chemotherapy and radiation therapy to prepare the body for new donor cells. Allogeneic transplants affect a condition called implant versus host disease, in which the recipient castoffs the donor cells, resulting in recurrent infections and other indications.

CAR T-cell Therapy­- This therapy uses re-engineered immune cells to attack specific cells to treat certain types of lymphoma or leukemia. However, this therapy may also harm or wear out B-Cells and affect the body’s power to develop antibodies.  

Thus, it is very essential for cancer patients to know how cancer treatments mutilate the immune system, possibly leading to conditions that enhance the risk of infection. So, you can take the above-mentioned steps to safeguard yourself and your immune system, particularly during the COVID-19 Pandemic. As cancer patients are adversely affected during this Coronavirus time.

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