NEUROPROTECTANT DRUGS IN CISPLATIN NEUROTOXICITY

Cisplatin (CDDP) is one among the most effective and widely used antic ancer drugs. Its use is, however, often limited by its peripheral neur otoxicity, which may be severely disabling and sometimes not reversibl e. To prevent or reduce CDDP peripheral neurotoxicity several ''neurop rotective'' drugs have been proposed. This goal is of extreme importan ce in the treatment of cancer patients, especially in view of the bett er results obtained by anticancer chemotherapy in terms of longer dise ase-free survival which has made even more crucial than in the past th e point of the quality of life of the long-surviving patients. The dat a of pre-clinical and clinical studies with neuroprotectant agents are often conflicting in some cases because of inadequate methods of eval uation and/or study design used to examine their effectiveness. The ai ms of this review will be 1) to discuss and describe the most appropri ate methods of evaluation of CDDP and neuro-protectant drugs in experi mental in vitro and in vivo pre-clinical studies 2) to evaluate critic ally the results of the clinical trials reported so far with the combi ned treatment and 3) to explore the possible future strategies to achi eve neuroprotection during high-dose CDDP treatment in humans.