Chill the scalp and save the hair!! The gruesome cancer attacks make sure the whole world gets to know about it by taking away the patient’s gorgeous hair along ! Hair may not be the main worry for a suffering patient but it does speak volumes about the cancer story. Chemotherapy in cancer treatment brings an undesirable side effect-it leads to loads of hair fall.
Will I lose my hair because of the treatment? Definitely! The chemotherapy results in hair fall and now the researchers have created a cold cap to prevent the loss of hair due to cancer treatment. Besides the physical trauma that the body undergoes one also has to carry on a battle against the increasing psychological issues and loosing hair is an embarrassment.
Now the researchers have developed a unique cold cap that will help in preventing the loss of hair as the person undergoes cancer treatment or chemotherapy.
Cancer-struck Miriam Lipton
A 45 year old lady, Miriam Lipton, who suffers from breast cancer, admits her embarrassment at walking around the grocery store with the “cancer related” questions flooding her. She was one of the first people to use the cold cap with success. When she had been diagnosed with the cancer Miriam had lost her glorious mane in the first 15 days of chemotherapy.
The second time her breast cancer came back Lipton went for the cold cap. This helped retain her hair and made the recovery process easy to bear. All one has to do is strap on the near freezing temperature cap on to the head and then watch the blood flow to the scalp reduce.
The cold cap “DigniCap”
The cold temperatures of the chilly cap stop the hair from falling out by stopping the cancer combating drug from ruining the hair follicles. But will this cold cap render the chemotherapy drugs ineffective? Well, this is what the researchers fear. They feel that the cancer cells near the scalp may be saved by the cold temperatures.
People need privacy and do not like to talk about cancer stigma. Hair loss is indicative of cancer and makes the whole story public. ,” Dr. Hope Rugo from the University of California, San Francisco confirms that patients generally tend to defer treatment because of the fear of hair loss, and she says rightly “We need to make this experience [chemotherapy] as tolerable as possible, so there’s the least baggage at the end.”
The US researchers are all ready to put this cold cap hair preserving treatment through the test of acceptance, the same way as Canada and Europe. Dr. Hope Rugo and Dr . Susan Melin of North Carolina’s Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center plan to start enrolling 110 patients diagnosed with early breast cancer to use the “DigniCap” or the scalp cooling technique trial. So lets keep the fingers crossed for FDA approval.
