why does chemotherapy have the strongest side effects on the skin and lining of the digestive tract?

Answer 1

traditional chemo has to penitrate the skin to reach the infected area and radiation decreases with distance so the skin has to be hit pretty hard to get a useful dose into the body. The digestive tract is very sensitive to any radation. The cells of the digestive tract are activly dividing which means among other things the dna is more exposed than other cells in your body that are in a resting state. Chemo is directed towards killing cells by damging the DNA. So activly replicating cells suffer the most damage.

Answer 2

Anti-cancer drugs are designed specifically to stop cancer cells from dividing and rapidly growing. Cancer cells were once normal cells. The majority of normal cells within the body do not grow once an organ like the lung, breasts, skin, kidneys, liver, colon, stomach, etc are complete. Those normal cells have a mechanism within them that stops all further growth.

Cancer cells for some reason are triggered to start growing. The cancer cells divide and grow rapidly forming a 'tumor' or many tumors. If the cancer cells are not stopped they will continue to grow and spred rapidly. So, chemotherapy is given with the direct purpose to stop the cancer cells from growing and dividing. There are some cells within the body that do normally grow, these are the cells in the digestive track, the reproductive system, blood cells in the bone marrow, and hair follicles. Chemo drugs cannot tell the difference between the cells that grow normally and the cancer cells. So, often the side effects of a particular chemo drug can upset the normal cells of these particular areas of the body. The result is that hair follicles are damaged and the result is that hair will fall out. Or during chemo the digestive tract will become upset causing the patient to feel nauseos or vomit. Or affect the blood counts causing fatigue or neutropenia. In the case of the reproductive system, the chemo can cause infertility.

All of these side effects are primarily temporary and there are medications to help with the nausea and neutropenia. When the patient stops taking chemo (after the cancer has been killed or removed) the normal cells will regenerate.

The discomfort of side effects is a small price to pay if chemotherapy stops cancer from growing, spredding, and killing you.

Answer 3

Lining Of Digestive Tract

Answer 4

I'm going to assume that you are asking about cancer chemotherapy..
First off, you should understand that cancers are basically cells that have lost control of the cell machinery that normally decides when a cell should start and stop dividing. Hence, cancer cells tend to divide uncontrollably and their numbers increase exponentially to the detriment of the rest of the tissues of the body.
Chemotherapy is aimed at destroying these rapidly dividing cells. The problem is that there are tissues with a high rate of turnover such as those in the digestive tract and hair follicles that also divide rapidly as a normal part of thier function. Since the chemo works by disrupting the ability of cells to replicate ,all rapidly-dividing cells tend to be affected, not just cancer cells.
I hope this answers your question.

Answer 5

Cancer cells divide rapidly which is why it's so threatning.. unfortunately skin cells, hair cells and the cells lining the digestive tract divide rapidly as well. Chemotherapy destroys those rapidly dividing cells

Answer 6

Well, many chemotherapeutic meds are drugs that interfere with cell division, so they attack fast dividing cells (and many, but not all cancers, grow and divide much faster than the normal cells in the body) so they will hit the tumor harder than your body (but they're toxic to everything). Because that's the case, they will be most toxic to the cells in your body that divide the fastest, which are things like skin, hair, and the lining of your intestines.
This is not true of all chemotherapeutic agents, but it is for many.

Answer 7

because it is so poisonous for the body! The liver gets the brunt of it and to help it cleanse and you be healthy take dandelion root and burdock root and milk thistle in tincture twice as much as it says on bottle. Drink plenty of water and eat a healthy diet of natural food. The liver and skin are directly related.
For healing of the digestive that gets raw, drink aloe very juice or gell.
That'll fixya