Cancer Treatments and Hair Loss

Hair loss (alopecia) is a common and usually temporary, but often very distressing, side effect of chemotherapy.

CancerIndex has split out information on chemotherapy related alopecia onto a dedicated page: http://www.cancerindex.org/Alopecia.htm

As well as links to guides on this topic the page also includes an NHS Choices video in which Jessica, a breast cancer patient, describes how the hair loss affected her. The video also includes expert advice from HeadStrong Coordinator Tansy Bateman.

The page also pulls in research abstracts from PubMed. Boughton et al.  interviewd Australian women who described alopecia as the most distressing corporeal feature of the ovarian cancer experience. In an earlier study Hilton et al. asked the question “Have men been overlooked?” and found that both women and men had negative (and often similar) feelings about hair loss. There are a few published studies on scalp cooling to reduce hair loss during chemotherapy, with mixed success. van den Hurk et al report on results of the Dutch Scalp Cooling Registry, involving 1411 chemotherapy patients.

http://www.cancerindex.org/Alopecia.htm

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Cancer Centers – Update

Our list of Cancer Centres has been updated:
http://www.cancerindex.org/clinks8.htm

It has grown to a list of over 260 centers, so rather than the very long static list that it used to be, it is now displayed in a ‘data table’ that you can search, filter and order.

Does this work for you? I’d love to hear your feedback.

It is amongst the top 20 most visited pages on the site. It is not a definitive list of all cancer centers but rather it focuses on large non-profit centers around the world including “Comprehensive Cancer Centres” (or similar) .

Of course there are many other hospitals not listed here; many local hospitals work closely with the larger specialist centres – this varies depending on your location and healthcare system.