Hair-raising adjunct for chemotherapy.

Many cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy rank hair loss as the treatment's worst side effect. While they can take medicines to help settle a sick stomach, they have no way to prevent their hair from coming out by the handful.

A naturally occurring protein, recently tested on rats, may one day block this emotionally distressing loss. Two physicians from the University of Miami have found that the protein, called epidermal growth factor (EGF), prevented balding among a group of six rats receiving high doses of cytosine arabinoside, a widely used anticancer drug also known as ARA-C.

Joaquin J. Jimenez and Adel A. Yunis rubbed EGF on a 1-entimeter patch of skin between the rats' shoulder blades three hours before each chemotherapy treatment. The EGF-treated spots retained hair after a week of daily chemotherapy, while the rest of each rat became denuded, they report in the Jan. 15 CANCER RESEARCH. In contrast, six rats receiving chemotherapy but no EGF lost all of their hair, Jimenez and Yunis found.

They and their colleagues had previously stumbled upon evidence that an immunity-stimulating bacterial compound named ImuVert could prevent hair loss when injected into rats treated with ARA-C or doxorubicin, another anticancer drug (SN: 9/29/90, p 199). But ImuVert's flu-like side effects make it "probably not too practical" for use in cancer patients, Yunis says, so he and Jimenez turned to other substances. In earlier clinical trials conducted by others, topical EGF had shown promise in promoting wound healing, with few side effects.

Although researchers still do not know how it works, EGF "may prove useful" as a topical preventive for hair loss among cancer patients receiving ARA-C, Yunis says. He cautions, however, that EGF does not block hair loss among animals given other anticancer drugs. He also notes that injected (but not topical) EGF is known to promote tumor growth in animals.