What works for itchy scalp due to taxane treatment?

ChemoCap

Hi, My name is Katharine. My Mom has stage 4 relapsed breast cancer. Her cancer came back about 2.5 years ago. She is 78 years old and currently being treated on Kadcyla. She initially did a 10 week course of weekly Pac + Herceptin + Perjeta when she first relapsed and did well on that until about 14 months ago when we had to switch her to Kadcyla. She has brain mets now and gets cyber knife periodically (just got treated this week actually). I am a biologist and do breast and ovarian cancer research (I worked at Genentech for 12 years) for a living actually (if anyone is going to be at SACS in Dec, let me know as I have a poster on Sat morning). I am always researching what is new and working well out in the community. When my Mom was on the taxane treatment, after her hair fell out, she developed a rather nasty case of chemo cap (taxane induced scalp rash). This didn't happen when she had her initial diagnosis 8 years ago and had been on Paclitaxel. I did my research and found that people were using pyrithione zinc (PZ) based products to help with the itching, flaking of their chemo cap. I make my own shampoo and conditioner as I have dandruff and the conditioner is 0.5% PZ so I used it on her scalp and after 3 days, the plaques had peeled away and the skin looked rather in good condition (compared to what I am used to after 20 years of cancer research). My question out to the community is: has anyone experienced scalp induced itchy, flaky (even plaque like) chemo cap and what did they use to treat it? I am trying to gather information to see if lotions such as lubriderm did any good, if more people are using steroid creams from their doctor and if anyone has tried using a PZ based product like head and shoulders or something similar? My goal is to test out my conditioner and eventually give it away (I just released it on the market) if I think that there is an actual need for it. Many thanks for your thoughts!

Moderators

Hi Katherine-

You might want to try your question in our chemo forum, which you can find here: https://community.breastcancer.org/forum/69

The Mods