Popular Chemotherapy Drug Dexamethasone Causes Loss of Sleep in Leukemia Patients

By Regina Sass

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has released the results of a study that shows that a popular anti-leukemia drug, dexamethasone is one of the causes for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia - ALL - having side effects like restless fatigue and sleeplessness. They also say that it is possible to reduce or eliminate most of the side effects by developing new methods to administer the drug.

The results of the study showed that dexamethasone has a significant impact on the patient's quality of life by causing fatigue, lengthening the time the child naps, and disrupting the sleep patterns at night. They say that the patients and their families should be informed of the possibility of side effects before they begin treatments. Dexamethasone is a chemotherapy drug and it is a long term treatment.

It is because of the results of a previous research that showed that while dexamethasone is one of the most courses of treatment for ALL, it was also responsible for many side effects. Based on these results, the team designed the present study to determine once and for all if there was a direct link between the drug and the side effects.

They watched the sleep activity of children in two back to back five day tests. The children wore a device on their wrists that is called an actigraph. This is a device that can sense motion and then store the information it gathers on a computer chip. During the first 5 day time frame, they did not get any dexamethasone. During the second one, they did. The parents also kept a daily diary of what they thought of the child's sleep and nap patterns. The younger group of children, 7 to 12, and the adolescent group, 13 to 18, completed surveys in which they gave themselves rating based on how tired they were and the parents filled out surveys on how fatigued they thought their child was.

There were 100 participants with an average age of 9 and were patients at one of three institutions, St. Jude, Texas Children's Cancer Center in Houston and Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. The researchers found the problems existed in all of the age groups.

Their next step is to see if there are ways to reduce the level of the side effects while at the same time keeping the same therapeutic effects in place

The lead researchers are Ching-Hon Pui, M.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Oncology and Pamela Hinds, Ph.D., R.N., director of the Division of Nursing Research at St. Jude. The rest of the tea is Jami S. Gattuso, Deo Kumar Srivastava, Xin Tong, and Nancy West all from St. Jude; Marilyn J. Hockenberry and Kathy S. McCarthy from Texas Children's Cancer Center; Heather Jones from the Hospital for Sick Children ; Avi Sadeh from Tel Aviv University, Israel; Monica Ash from Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, Baton Rouge, La. and Cheryl Fernandez from Louisiana State University, Shreveport, La.

This work was supported by a Cancer Center Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Nursing Research and ALSAC.

Source; St. Judes http://newswise.com
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