Fingernail changes due to chemotherapy with therapeutic agents from the taxane group often diminish the quality of life of cancer patients and it has been reported that 30% of patients undergoing chemotherapy with these agents experience nail changes.
We examined the effectiveness of local hypothermia in preventing such changes in two patients who had already experienced them.Local hypothermia was achieved by simply keeping the patients’fingers in iced water from 15 minutes before the start of chemotherapy to 15 minutes after it ended,and the effectiveness of such treatment was evaluated using Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events Version 3 by a Japanese clinical oncology group.
In the 1 st patient,the nail changes slowly improved from grade 3 to grade 0 after 3 months,and after 8 months in the second.In addition,neither patient exhibited any signs of neuropathy associated with chemotherapeutic agents from the taxane group.The immersion of the fingers in iced water thus proved to be a simple,low-cost method of preventing nail changes due to chemotherapy with taxane group chemicals in these 2 patients.
