A study looking at how your body make up may affect chemotherapy (CANDO-2)

This study is looking at how your body make up (body composition) may affect how your cancer responds to chemotherapy and how bad the side effects may be. The study is open to women who have early breast cancer.

Doctors can treat early breast cancer with chemotherapy. Like all treatments, chemotherapy has side effects. We know that some people get more severe side effects than others and that chemotherapy works better for some people than others. We aren’t sure why this is, but the amount of muscle, blood and fatty tissue in your body (your body make up) may have something to do with it.

Doctors work out how much chemotherapy to give by using your height and weight only. They don’t take into consideration your body make up. The researchers think that knowing and using your body make up to work out how much chemotherapy to give may be better and also reduce the side effects.

In this study, your doctor will work out how much chemotherapy to give using your height and weight. The researchers will use special scales to find out what your body make up is.

The aims of this study are to find out:

• if it is possible to use these scales to work out how much chemotherapy to give

• if this way of working out how much chemotherapy to give is more accurate and if it reduces the side effects

Taking part in this study won’t change your treatment but the information collected may help people in the future who have chemotherapy.