Women Experience More Cancer Treatment Side Effects Than Men

Previous research has shown that women typically experience more side effects from chemotherapy than men and now a new study shows that this is also the case with targeted therapies and immunotherapy.

The work published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology looked at data from 23,296 patients on 202 clinical trials for a variety of cancer types and therapies. The researchers found that overall, women were at a 34% higher risk of severe toxicity than men.

Toxicities caused by cancer therapies are a significant issue in cancer treatment regimens. They range from pain, nausea and high blood pressure to life-threatening effects on organs and the bone marrow. Side-effects can be so severe that they lead to discontinuation of the treatment and sometimes even death.

Older chemotherapies typically come with more unpleasant and damaging side-effects than newer treatments as they are more likely to negatively effect healthy cells as well as the tumor. But even newer, targeted treatments can also come with toxicities and side-effects.

"It has been understood that women have more toxicity from chemotherapy than men, but almost no research has aimed to understand whether that pattern held for novel treatments like immunotherapy or targeted therapies, said health services researcher Joseph Unger, PhD, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “We found similar large differences, especially for immune treatments,” he added.

For immunotherapies - drugs which influence the immune system to fight the cancer - women had a 49% greater risk than men of experiencing severe toxic side effects from their treatment.

The researchers write that they aren’t entirely sure what underpins these sex-related differences in treatment responses, but some possibilities include differences in how men and women’s bodies process drugs, how the therapies are administered to them or how men and women report their symptoms.

“Increasingly, treatments for cancer will be more individualized for patients,” said Unger. “These findings indicate that patient sex may be an important consideration for individualized treatment, including for novel new treatments like immunotherapy,” he added.

The authors hope that their work might lead to further research in sex-related differences in treatment toxicities and possible interventions to reduce side-effects in women and others at higher-risk.

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