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A group of drugs that transformed survival rates for children with liver cancer have been found to cause genetic mutations in healthy liver tissue that speed up how fast the organ ages.
The drugs are platinum-based chemotherapy agents, a class that uses platinum compounds to damage the DNA inside tumor cells and stop them from dividing.
A study published Thursday in Science examined two agents from that class, cisplatin and carboplatin, and their effects on children treated for hepatoblastoma, a rare liver cancer.
Hepatoblastoma is the most commonly diagnosed liver cancer in childhood. Before platinum-based chemotherapy became standard, the five-year survival rate for the disease sat at around 20%.
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