What chemo dose should my 150-pound Golden Retriever take?: An adverse drug reaction story

Dr. Lawrence Burgh has a sober outlook on life. A 48-year-old physician whose career has centered on treating seriously ill patients, he himself was diagnosed with cancer in December 2006. He has begun dosing himself with DCA, a simple laboratory chemical that has never before been used to treat cancer in people.

Last month, he learned the cancer in his thigh had spread to his lungs. "My prognosis is very poor," he says. "Standard chemotherapy would give me only a slim chance of survival at five years." So he turned to DCA, after reading about the promising lab experiments in New Scientist (20 January, p 13).

But Lawrence (a pseudonym) has yet to see DCA make any impact on his cancer. Medical scans on 19 March showed that the primary tumour in his thigh has shrunk, and is less active, but this may be due to the delayed effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy Burgh had in January. The number of metastatic tumors in his lungs has not changed since last month, and they are larger and more active. "These results are very preliminary," he stresses, "but I was really hoping for better results." On 21 March, he stopped taking the drug after noticing symptoms which by 24 March included a numbness in his hands, which he believes to be a sign of a disease of the nervous system (neuropathy), and a hypoglycemic attack. He advises other people with cancer not to self-medicate with DCA except under medical supervision. "I am concerned others may try this drug on their own in desperation," he says. "DCA is chemotherapy, a serious drug with potentially serious side effects."

DCA is not patentable as a medication, so there is no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to run the clinical trials necessary to make DCA legal as a cancer treatment. So two Web sites sprang up: one with research papers and chat rooms to discuss DCA, and another site selling DCA supposedly for use in pets with terminal cancer. Both sites are run by a California man who operates a pest-control company. The FDA is investigating both web sites because DCA hasn't gone through clinical trials or been approved for human use. Even marketing DCA for pets is illegal. Even so, researchers have been getting emails from people asking for dosage information for, say, a 150-pound "Golden Retriever."

Advice to patients with advanced cancer: Read Linda Geddes’ article in the New Scientist, the research, and the web site of the Abigail Alliance, which advocates faster drug development for critically ill patients, then discuss it with your oncologist.

Read another chemo story.

Thanks to April Rabkin of Mother Jones for summarizing the New Scientist article.