Hairy Cell Leukemia Treatment Side Effects

Symptoms from these can include fever cough rashes headaches or confusion.

Hairy cell leukemia treatment side effects.

It also causes damage to fast growing normalcells including hair cells and cells that make up the tissues in your mouth gut and bone marrow. Types of hairy cell leukemia treatment for many people with hairy cell leukemia starting treatment helps them focus on moving ahead and looking forward to their disease s remission. Hairy cell leukemia hcl is a cancer of the blood that starts in your bone marrow the soft tissue inside bones where blood cells are made. This summary is about hairy cell leukemia.

Hairy cell leukemia treatment. Chemotherapy kills cells that multiply quickly such as leukaemic cells. Drugs used in chemotherapy such as cladribine work in different ways to stop the growth of cancer cells either by killing the cells by stopping them from dividing or by stopping them from spreading. What are the side effects of hairy cell leukaemia treatment.

Find out everything you need to know about hairy cell leukemia including treatment options. Before you undergo treatment talk with your doctor about potential side effects. Lurie comprehensive cancer center of northwestern university. This may cause infection anemia and easy bleeding.

What are the side effects from the treatments. Patients without symptoms often don t need to be treated right away but they do need to be watched carefully. This phase ii trial studies the side effects and how well cladribine and rituximab work in treating patients with hairy cell leukemia. Patients with hairy cell leukemia have disturbed immune systems due to changes in their blood cells.

Some of the leukemia cells may collect in the spleen and cause it to swell. Hairy cell leukemia hcl tends to be slow growing. Feinberg school of medicine. Clinical trials are studying new biological therapies and targeted therapies for treating hairy cell leukemia.

Doctor visits are done every few months to check for signs that the hcl is growing and to see if it s causing any problems like low blood counts fatigue or an enlarged spleen. Cancer therapy for hairy cell leukemia can sometimes produce side effects. For most patients treatment side effects are temporary and go away once therapy ends. Other drugs that target the immune system may be recommended if your cancer returns or if it doesn t respond to standard treatments.

For other patients side effects can be more severe sometimes requiring hospitalization. Infections due to fungus and viruses can affect the skin lungs liver or brain.