Will chemotherapy for early stage brain cancer cause hair loss?

It is well known that cancer chemotherapy can cause hair loss. This statement has been explained in various movies and TV series. This is also one of the reasons why chemotherapy can cause great psychological pressure on people. According to relevant data, more than 75% of patients undergoing chemotherapy for tumors will experience varying degrees of nausea and vomiting. So, will brain cancer cause hair loss in the early stages?

Chemotherapy is the only treatment option for some tumors, which can be said to be fighting poison with poison. Tumor chemotherapy is the application of chemical drugs (including endocrine drugs) to treat malignant tumors. After entering the body, anticancer drugs are quickly distributed throughout the body, killing both local tumors and distant metastatic tumors. Therefore, chemotherapy is a systemic treatment. The effect of chemotherapy depends on the type and condition of the tumor. Some can be cured, while more can inhibit tumor growth and spread. There are currently more than 50 types of chemotherapy drugs, most of which are chemically synthesized and are cytotoxic drugs.

Chemotherapy is one of the important means of treating malignant tumors. It is one of the three major treatment methods along with surgery and radiotherapy. Surgical resection is the preferred treatment method for most tumors to date. For some localized tumors with a small tendency to spread (such as skin cancer), surgery or radiotherapy alone can cure them. However, for tumors with an obvious tendency to spread (such as small cell lung cancer, testicular tumors, osteosarcoma, lung adenocarcinoma, etc.), even surgery or radiotherapy alone in the early stages cannot prevent tumor recurrence and distant metastasis. Some patients, although undergoing radical surgery or extended radical surgery, cannot achieve a radical effect and require systemic chemotherapy. Since chemotherapy is a systemic treatment method, chemotherapy is the main treatment method for some tumors with a tendency to spread throughout the body and mid- to late-stage tumors.

Chemotherapy drugs do not have specific targets, they only inhibit cells that grow fast. One of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they grow rapidly, divide constantly, and grow rapidly. However, some cells in our human body also grow rapidly and are replaced quickly under normal circumstances. For example, periosteal cells, hair follicle cells, oral mucosal cells, digestive tract epithelial cells, etc. After traditional chemotherapy drugs are injected into the body through intravenous injection, they quickly spread throughout the body, killing cancer cells while indiscriminately attacking these rapidly growing cells, so common side effects appear, including hair loss, vomiting, etc.

There are about 100,000 hairs on our human scalp, and a normal person loses 100 to 150 hairs every day. New hair will grow to make up for the lost hair. There are two ways of hair loss after patients receive chemotherapy. One is that the hair gradually becomes thinner and then breaks in the middle when the chemotherapy is at the highest dose. The other is that the hair roots are severely suppressed and fall directly from the roots. Hair loss is not just the head hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and pubic hair will fall off to varying degrees. For some people, all their hair falls out quickly within 1 to 3 weeks after chemotherapy, while for others, it falls out slowly and lasts for a long time. This type of hair loss is usually most obvious when combing or washing your hair, so cancer patients who don't wash their hair so frequently may see a lot of hair fall out in one wash.

Although hair loss after chemotherapy looks scary and disturbing, the lost hair will grow back when chemotherapy stops or even in the later stages of chemotherapy (don't worry, this is not a sign that the chemotherapy is ineffective), so don't worry too much.