Why does chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer produce side effects

In the treatment of pancreatic cancer, chemotherapy has been widely used as a neoadjuvant therapy before pancreatic cancer surgery or after pancreatic cancer radical resection, with the aim of enabling patients to obtain better surgical results and preventing the recurrence of pancreatic cancer.

Chemotherapy is a method of treating diseases with chemical synthetic drugs. It is currently one of the main means of treating tumors and certain autoimmune diseases. However, during treatment, patients generally experience obvious side effects such as nausea and vomiting, which causes discomfort to patients.

This is because chemotherapy is a systemic treatment, and anticancer drugs do not specifically kill tumor cells, but merely prevent cell proliferation. However, many normal stem cells are often in the process of proliferation, such as hematopoietic cells, lymphocytes, oral and gastrointestinal mucosal epithelial cells, hair follicle cells, and germ cells.

When chemotherapy drugs are used, while killing actively proliferating tumor cells, they also cause damage to these actively proliferating normal tissue stem cells, resulting in toxic reactions such as leukocytopenia, gastrointestinal reactions, hair loss, oral ulcers, teratogenesis, and amenorrhea.

The direct manifestations of these toxic reactions are that patients will experience physical weakness, decreased immune function, gastrointestinal disorders, inflammatory reactions, etc., which will not only cause damage to human body functions, but in severe cases may even lead to death.