Side Effects of Cancer Treatments

A wide variety of drugs is used to treat cancer.  Many of them have side effects, some of them potentially serious and long-lasting.
One reason that cancer drugs tend to have many/severe side effects is that cancer cells are not very different from healthy cells.  Because of this close similarity,  drugs that kill cancer cells frequently also affect normal cells.  Choose a topic from the list on the left to learn about a particular side-effect and treatments/prevention methods.

Additional psychosocial effects, including depression, are discussed in our section on cancer survivorship.

The National Cancer Institute has produced a concise guide to survivorship that includes suggestions for how to cope with many of the side effects listed in this section.  Get the guide to post-treatment survivorship from the NCI.