Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Short-term side effects of chemotherapy
By Mayo Clinic staffEach woman's experience with chemotherapy and its side effects is different, partly due to differences among drugs and dosages and partly due to the body's unique reaction to these medicines. Some women lose their hair, lose their appetite, or experience vomiting, diarrhea or mouth sores. Other women on the identical treatment may not have these reactions. It's not possible to predict precisely which side effects you might have. But most of these problems subside after finishing treatment.
What causes side effects?
Normal, healthy cells in the blood, hair follicles and digestive tract are some of the most rapidly dividing cells in your body. Anti-cancer chemotherapy drugs target rapidly dividing cells. In the process of killing cancer cells, they also damage other rapidly dividing cells, such as those in the hair follicles, bone marrow and digestive tract. The results include hair loss, lowered blood counts, nausea and vomiting. As you go through each treatment cycle, you also may be more prone to fatigue, infection, bruising or bleeding.
Can side effects be controlled?
Various drugs are used to help reduce nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy. Sometimes doctors can adjust the dose or schedule of treatment to counter side effects. If chemotherapy has damaged your infection-fighting blood cells, a doctor may adjust future doses of chemotherapy or may add medications that help the bone marrow to recover more quickly. Most side effects don't last long. Hair grows back, but it may return with a slightly different color, texture or both.
Emotional distress
Feelings of fear, sadness and isolation compound the physical side effects of chemotherapy, both during and after treatment. In fact, some women are unexpectedly sad at the conclusion of treatment. During chemotherapy, women with breast cancer have regular contact with and support from oncologists and nurses. Everyone involved is working toward the same goal — completion of treatment with the best possible control of side effects — so there's a shared sense of purpose. When it's over, some women feel like they've been left alone, with no one to help them return to normal life or deal with fears of breast cancer recurrence. It may help to talk with someone who has been in the same situation. Connect with others via a cancer-survivor hot line, support group or online community.
Cognitive function
"Chemo brain," "chemo fog" and "chemo memory" are terms used to describe little-understood short-term memory and concentration problems that occur in some women after chemotherapy.
See the "Related links" section of this guide for links to more information on strategies to manage chemotherapy-related side effects.
Long-term side effects of chemotherapy Combination chemotherapy for breast cancer
