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[00:01.00]SARAH LONG:You are listening to the Special English program SCIENCE IN THE NEWS on VOA.
[00:06.98]This is Sarah Long with Bob Doughty in Washington.
[00:12.18]Chemotherapy is a common way to fight cancer.
[00:16.80]Doctors give patients powerful drugs to kill cancer cells.
[00:22.44]However,chemotherapy drugs often are poisonous to healthy cells as well.
[00:29.39]Patients often suffer unwanted side effects.
[00:33.57]Among the most common side effects are a sick feeling in the stomach and the uncontrolled expulsion of food from the mouth.
[00:43.78]Other side effects are hair loss,a feeling of weakness and infection.
[00:50.94]In addition,patients who have traditional chemotherapy often say they suffer from temporary memory loss and reduced thinking ability.
[01:02.51]Tim Ahles of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover,New Hampshire,organized a study of the problem
[01:10.48]BOB DOUGHTY:Doctor Ahles compared cancer patients who had traditional chemotherapy to patients who had limited treatments.
[01:19.99]The two groups were tested for memory,reading ability,and the ability to think clearly.
[01:29.26]Doctor Ahles says his study showed that patients who had traditional chemotherapy were two times as likely as the other patients to do poorly in the intelligence tests.
[01:44.00]Doctor Ahles presented the findings to a group of cancer patients who had chemotherapy.
[01:51.68]He says those patients felt better knowing that the study found evidence of what many of them already knew.
[02:02.18]Doctor Ahles says almost everyone who has chemotherapy experiences problems with memory and thinking.
[02:12.21]He says the problems are most common from the middle of treatment until up to four months after the chemotherapy stops.
[02:23.65]He says the ability to think clearly begins to improve later.
[02:29.97]SARAH LONG:Recently,research scientists in Canada reported similar findings about chemotherapy.
[02:37.76]The findings were reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
[02:42.96]Researchers from Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto studied breast cancer patients who were given chemotherapy.
[02:51.76]They compared the patients to other women who were not receiving the treatment.
[02:57.56]The Canadian researchers found the women taking the anticancer drugs did worse in tests of memory and language than the other women.
[03:08.50]The researchers say doctors and patients should understand the problem when making treatment decisions.
[03:16.05]However,they say this possible problem should not be used as an argument against chemotherapy treatment.
