Neural Pathways Responsible for Chemotherapy’s Side Effects

Chemotherapy’s side effects affecting the sensory and motor system may be associated with the neural circuits or pathways as per a study at the Georgia Institute of Technology, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The life-saving benefits of cancer treatment are often undermined by its severe and persistent disability like pain and fatigue along with other side effects like sensory, motor, and cognitive disorders.

These findings may help impact development of effective treatments that are not yet available for restoring a patient’s normal abilities to receive and process sensory input as part of post-cancer treatment, in particular.

“Chemotherapy undoubtedly negatively influences the peripheral nervous system, which is often viewed as the main culprit of neurologic disorders during cancer treatment. This occurs through synaptic communication between neurons. Through an elegant series of studies, we show that those hubs of communication in the central nervous system are also vulnerable to cancer treatment’s adverse effects,” says Stephen N. (Nick) Housley, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences, the Integrated Cancer Research Center, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, and is the study’s lead author.

The study thereby states that sensorimotor disability occurring because of cancer treatment is due to the joint expression of independent defects that occurs in both peripheral and central elements of sensorimotor circuits.

Source-Medindia