What is the advantage of dose-dense therapy? Is there a downside?
Breaks between chemotherapy doses are meant to give a chance for normal cells of the body, particularly bone marrow, to recover. There is a concern that cancer cells keep growing during those “recovery breaks,” which are ordinarily 3 to 4 weeks long. Dose-dense therapy is a way to give chemotherapy every 2 weeks instead of every 3 weeks by injecting drugs, such as Neupogen® (filgrastim) or Neulasta® (pegfilgrastim), to bring your white count up faster to enable you to receive the next cycle of chemotherapy sooner. The theoretical advantage of dose-dense therapy is to not allow a 3-week drug “holiday” for cancer cells to repopulate. This approach, when compared with an every 3-week approach of chemotherapy delivery, showed a slight advantage in survival rates after 5 years. The other advantage is that the patients finish chemotherapy in 4 months instead of 6 months. There is very little downside to this therapy in terms of having to receive these injections to bring up your blood cell c
