Vincristine Administration Warning to Doctors
A rare but probably underreported drug mix-up involving a potent cancer drug can kill or permanently paralyze patients, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) warned Thursday.
The drug vincristine is supposed to be injected into a vein but is sometimes accidentally added to spinal catheters used for different drugs in lymphoma patients. Administering vincristine into the spine kills nerve cells and is usually fatal. About 49 cases of vincristine mix-ups worldwide happened since 1968. About 90% of patients died. In 2002 it is reported a 49-year-old New Jersey man died while undergoing treatment for lymphoma.
If you are scheduled to receive chemotherapy via the spine you should double check with your health care team that vincristine will not be administered via the spine. Vincristine should only be administered by the manufacturer's instructions which is usually by IV (vein).
More Articles
More Articles
Amazon.com is pleased to have the Lymphoma Information Network in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship items...
The question ought to be what are myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), since this is a group of similar blood and bone marrow diseases that...
Merkel Cell Carcinoma (MCC) is a very rare and aggressive skin cancer that usually develops when a person is in his or her 70s. It is...
At some point, the Seattle biotech company Cell Therapeutics Inc (CTI) should earn an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for utter and...
Site Beginnings
This site was started as Lymphoma Resource Page(s) in 1994. The site was designed to collect lymphoma...
Three papers appearing in the journal Blood and pointing towards a regulator-suppressor pill could offer hope to blood cancer...
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a third so-called Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the investigational oral...
The US Food and Drug Administration today has approved an expanded use of Imbruvica (ibrutinib) in patients with...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it has granted "Breakthrough Therapy Designation" for the investigational agent...
According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of California, San...
Pharmacyclics has announced that the company has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for...
New research suggests that frontline radioimmunotherapy...
Gilead Sciences has announced results of the company's Phase II study of its investigational compound idelalisib, an oral inhibitor of...
