Calcium and magnesium prophylaxis for oxaliplatin-related neurotoxicity: Is it a trade-off between drug efficacy and toxicity?

摘要

The improvement in the treatment of cancer patients achieved by oncologists over the last decades allowing longer survival times associated with the more effective management of several major side effects of antineoplastic chemotherapy (e.g., myelosuppression and emesis) permitted other toxicities to emerge as clinically relevant issues. At the same time, the greater number of long-term cancer survivors indicates the need for an even more serious consideration of the quality of life of these patients [1,2], with rigorous attempts to quantify its impairment and to improve it through different pharmacological and nonpharmacological approaches. With this background, chemotherapy-induced peripheral neurotoxicity (CIPN) represents one of the most serious side effects experienced by patients treated with platinum drugs, taxanes, vinca alkaloids, epothilones, bortezomib, and thalidomide [3,4]. In fact, all these drugs used to treat a wide spectrum of solid and hemato-logical malignancies can induce severe CIPN in a proportion of cancer patients, and its severity can be dose-limiting [5].