Dry Skin as a Side Effect of Cancer Treatment
Dry skin is one of the more common side effects of most forms of cancer treatment, including both radiation therapy and chemotherapy. While there are many other causes of dry skin, it is one of the more common issues cancer patients must learn to cope with as a routine part of their treatment.
Dry skin occurs when there is a lack of moisture in the skin cells, this can cause your skin to appear rough, scaly, and flaky. Your skin may also feel tight and constantly itchy. While dry skin is a fairly common condition among those who are not undergoing treatment for cancer, it is more common among those who are undergoing chemo or radiation therapy.
Constant Cell Replacement
Under normal conditions,
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Mario Lacouture of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, "There are many things you can do to prevent dry skin. People tend to think of dry skin as just a cosmetic problem but dry skin can get so severely dry that it becomes inflamed and more susceptible to infections." If you notice any changes whatsoever, it is important for you to let your doctor or cancer care team know about them. They are a very important source for information about what is happening to your skin and how you should care for it during and after your treatment.
There are also several very important steps you can take to help reduce the damaging effects of both chemotherapy and radiation therapy to your skin.
Treat Your Skin Gently
During and immediately after treatment you need to be very gentle in the way you treat your skin. Try not to rub, scratch, or scrub your skin. When you get out of the shower be sure to pat your skin dry with the towel instead of rubbing it. Wear clothes that are soft next to your skin to reduce irritation. Unless your doctor tells you to do so, avoid using ice packs on any treated areas of skin as they will only cause it to dry out more
These recurrent nodules and abscesses not only cause pain, but self-consciousness, social isolation and even depression. Other less common complications include severe infections, restricted movement caused by a buildup of fibrosis and a type of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma.
If having dry skin isn’t bad enough, witnessing it in front of you get into clumps and morphing into a patch of dry skin most be the worst. Ichtyosis Vulgaris (or also called fish scale disease) is a skin disorder that is passed down the family line that leads to dry, scaly skin. Ichtyosis Vulgaris is one type of skin disorder that is very common. You are born with this skin disease which it is inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern. This type of skin disease is not life threating at all but there really isn’t a way to cure it at you just have to go on living with it. They symptoms of Ichtyosis Vulgaris are: dry skin, scaly skin, mild itching of the skin, and maybe some skin thickening. With time the dry skin can actually begin to bunch up together and start to create patches on your skin covering large areas of your body such as the back, arms, and legs. Unless spotted at a young age most cases of Ichtyosis Vulgaris go undiagnosed due people thinking that it is only “dry skin”
To avoid skin discoloration, you may follow the same recommendations for avoiding venous insufficiency. These
There are essentially three main types of cancer treatments; surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Surgery allows doctors to effectively remove tumors from a clear plane. Chemotherapy uses drugs to treat the tumor; but often the drugs affect other healthy cells in the process. Using radiation as a treatment can be either precise or vague. Many health stigmas can come from the vague forms of radiation or conventional radiation therapy. Conventional radiation treats both the unhealthy and healthy cells, therefore exposing healthy cells to harmful radiation (Radiation Oncology, 2011, p.6). When healthy cells are exposed to gamma radiation they are also exposed to ionizing radiation. The ionization can cause “breakage of chemical bonds or oxidization (addition of oxygen atoms)” in a cell; the main impact of this is on a cell’s DNA, if two strands of DNA break it can result in “mutations, chromosome aberrations, ...
The prognosis of eczema usually depends on the type you have and what treatments you use. If you had contact eczema, you would still have to be careful to not expose yourself to the substance again or your immune system will respond to it and you will develop a rash. Sometimes, it could be a chronic condition that is
Radiation therapy is a complex treatment plan to treat cancer in patients. Its treatment can be used alone or in conjunction with surgery or chemotherapy. Radiation therapy is delivered by a team of individuals who specialize in the treatment of cancer. There are several ways in which the radiation can be delivered to the patient with specialized equipment. Radiation therapy is an exciting field of study that can be beneficial to patients who are affected by cancer.
...effects that can come with chemotherapy such as nausea, vomiting, hair loss, fatigue, mouth sores, and more. Radiation therapy is pretty bad but not as painful with side effects. Side effects for radiation therapy are coughing, fever, fullness of chest, soreness and scaring. Many times surgery is not an option but when is it is one of the best options due to the fact there are less side effects and no strenuous treatment. One of the reasons cancer is such a bad thing is because the treatment is not good but research is taking place and working to get more effective.
...of the skin and slows down the process of skin growth. Phototherapy is often used without the usage of other medicine, but if the psoriasis is very severe, than it can work well with other treatments. The most common risk factor of using this method is skin cancer and skin damage around the edges of the unaffected area.
Skin cancer is a disease where cancer (malignant) cells are found on the outer layer of the skin (epidermis). The three types of cells found in the epidermis are squamous cells, basal cells, and melanocytes. These cells in time grow to be cancerous. Thus, the three types of skin cancers are squamous cell, basal cell, and melanoma. Melanoma is the most deadliest and destructive type of cancer. (“Skin Cancer” infotrac.com) The number of people with melanoma has risen in Scotland from 3.5 in 1979 to 10.6 per 100,000 in 1998 for men and 7.0 to 13.1 for women. (Miller 945) Squamous cell and Basal cell skin cancer can kill up to 2,200 people a year in the United States. (Sommerfield SIRS.com) Basal cell, being the most common type of skin cancer, is the cancer that about 75 percent of the people have. (“Skin Cancer “ infotrac.com) Melanoma is mostly seen in older men but ever since tanning came in during the 1970’s, it has increased in women 60 percent around the ages 15-29 over the past three decades.(Sommerfield SIRS.com) “And basal cell and squamous cell cancers are increasing at a rate of about 5 percent per year”(Sommerfield SIRS.com).
The importance of skin-to-skin care for the childbearing family is that every newborn can benefit. Skin-to-skin is valuable because it promotes thermoregulation, cardio-respiratory stability, breast milk supply, and mother-infant bonding (Hugill, 2015; Baker-Rush, 2016; Gregson, 2011; Pigeon Turenne, Héon, Aita, Faessler, & Doddridge, 2016). The nurse’s role in skin-to-skin is to educate women and their families of its benefits. The nurse will be able to implement the carative factors of a teaching-learning experience with the parents, develop a helping-trusting relationship, as well as tend to basic human needs of the patients (Watson, 2008).
While chemotherapy is beneficial at curing or helping a disease such as cancer, it can has a negative effect on a person’s body too.
...cations. Many people will find that amount of sunlight they receive has little or no impact on the state of their psoriasis, but in the cases where the light therapy has worked, it seems to reduce the appearance of the lesions greatly. Obviously, the risk of the UV light therapy is the possible threat of skin cancer.
Eczema is one example of a dry skin condition. An eczema sufferer will have cracked skin, redness and inflammation.
I have chosen to do my essay on the largest organ of the body, skin. It has several functions vital to the survival of the body as I will discuss in the following paragraphs.
We need the sun for everything; food, transportation, education, and just to live. The sun negatively affects us in our daily lives because our skin is sensitive to the sun. This means that we are prone to burn. A way to protect our skin is with sunscreen. The short-term effect of not wearing sunscreen when exposed to the sun is you can get a painful rash or peeling of skin can occur. Long-term effects of not protecting yourself from the sun can be that it changes your DNA or gives you skin cancer. It changes your DNA by radiation smashing into you skin. The reason why this is so dangerous is because the DNA will now instruct the skin to fix itself because of the radiation, but the instructions would have been changed. It can also speed up