What are late effects of cancer treatment?
Late effects are side effects of cancer treatment that become apparent after your treatment has ended. Cancer survivors might experience late effects of cancer treatment a few months after treatment is completed or years later.
It isn't clear why these effects are delayed. Some doctors believe that late effects simply weren't noticed during and immediately after your treatment, though the damage may have been there all along. It could be that your body was compensating for the damage caused by cancer treatment and is no longer able to do that, revealing these late effects.
Some side effects start during your cancer treatment and linger for months or years after. These are called long-term side effects of cancer treatment. For example, nerve damage (peripheral neuropathy) is common during some types of chemotherapy and may begin during treatment but linger for months or even years after cancer treatment is completed. Most long-term effects lessen with time.
Some cancer survivors wonder why they weren't told about the possibility of lingering or late side effects before they began treatment. Sometimes cancer survivors were told, but with so much to remember and go through when you're first diagnosed and beginning treatment, it's easy to forget or not absorb all the information you're given. Sometimes your doctor doesn't discuss late side effects because it's impossible to discuss every single side effect, early or late, that some treatments have. It's also possible that the late effects of your treatment weren't known at the time you began that treatment.