Kate Middleton shocked the world by announcing she has cancer in a deeply personal and emotional televised statement.
The Princess of Wales, 42, announced she is undergoing ‘preventative chemotherapy’, with her disease being spotted after major abdominal surgery in January.
But what is preventative chemotherapy? When is it used? Is it the same as traditional chemo? And what are the side effects?
Discovering cancer after an operation is ‘not uncommon’, a top doctor has said.
Dr Mangesh Thorat, deputy director of the Barts clinical trials unit at the centre for cancer prevention at Queen Mary university, told Sky News: ‘It is not very common, but it’s not uncommon either.
‘We often find this because the scans we do pre-operatively often have their limitations. When things are looked under the microscope, after an organ is taken away, you get a much better resolution and then you pick up the cancer.
‘So it’s not uncommon.’
Here, MailOnline explains all…
Kate Middleton shocked the world by announcing she has cancer in a deeply personal and emotional televised statement
What treatment is Kate getting?
In her emotional statement filmed at Windsor, Kate said her medical team ‘advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy’.
She revealed she was in the ‘early stages of that treatment’, which began in late February.
Kate is now said to be in a ‘recovery pathway’. No other details were given.
Chemotherapy uses powerful drugs to attack tumours and is typically given to treat cancer directly or shrink a tumour in preparation for surgery.
As in Kate’s case, chemo can also be used as a preventative option in the hope of stopping cancer coming back.
Diagram showing how preventative chemotherapy works
Does this mean her cancer has already gone?
No details were shared as to whether this was the case.
Kate only shared that her major abdominal surgery in London in January, for what doctors thought was a non-cancerous condition before learning the truth, was successful.
Preventative chemotherapy, also called adjuvant chemotherapy, aims to stop cancer coming back once the main tumour has been removed from the body.
The NHS says it can be used to ‘reduce the risk of the cancer coming back after radiotherapy or surgery’.
What does the treatment entail?
Preventative chemotherapy is most often delivered as an IV drip or tablets where they are then carried throughout the body by the bloodstream.
Depending on the type, chemotherapy can be administered in either a hospital or in the comfort of a patient’s home.
There are over 100 types of chemotherapy drugs.
All work in a similar way, circulating through the blood to stop cancerous cells anywhere in the body reproducing by killing them before they get chance to divide. This prevents them from growing and spreading in the body.
What are the side effects?
Cancer Research UK says: ‘The fact that chemotherapy drugs kill dividing cells helps to explain why chemotherapy causes side effects.
‘Body tissues are made of billions of individual cells.
‘Once we are fully grown, most of the body’s cells don’t divide and multiply much. They only divide if they need to repair damage.’
However, some cells still do divide in fully grown adults, like ones found in hair (which is constantly growing) and skin (which renews itself all the time).
Because the treatment indiscriminately affects body tissues, regardless of whether they are cancerous or not, it can trigger side effects like hair loss, fatigue and bruising.
Often a patient undergoing chemotherapy also takes other medication designed to help mitigate or combat some of these symptoms.
Symptoms typically disappear when the course of treatment finishes.