Breast cancer treatment side effect for women of color

Women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer often face many side effects. One, called neuropathy, causes extreme pain, and research shows it happens more often to Black women.

Now, doctors are finding ways to decrease that risk.

Vsaysha Wright is a busy mother of two.

“I’m a football mom, a cheerleading mom,” Wright said.

She’s also a breast cancer survivor. In 2019, at just 31 years old.

“I found a lump,” she said.

She had stage 2 breast cancer. She started chemotherapy, and after a couple of treatments, she developed neuropathy, a side effect that causes numbness, tingling and pain in the hands and feet.

“I couldn’t feel my fingertips or my toes, so when I would try to braid my baby’s hair or button up my kids’ clothes, I couldn’t. I had no feeling whatsoever,” Wright said.

Dr. Bryan Schneider said that anyone can experience it during chemotherapy, but the risk is “substantially” higher in Black women.

“We’ve been on a decade-long mission to try to understand why that is,” he said.

He led a clinical study of Black women with breast cancer who were undergoing treatment to see if there was a way to reduce the risk of neuropathy.

“And what we found, fortunately, was that one of the drugs, a commonly used drug called Taxotere or docetaxel, has significantly less neuropathy in this population,” he said.

Schneider said this is a huge step in improving treatment and life after treatment because for some women, once they develop neuropathy, it never goes away.

Fortunately, Wright recovered from her neuropathy.

Wright’s now four years into remission.

This drug can bring on many other side effects, so it requires an important conversation between the doctor and patient, but when the risk of neuropathy is high, preventing that usually trumps all the other side effects.