Side effects of treatment for leukemia

I do not know the technical reasoning behind this, but I do from personal experience that a lot of the drugs taken by someone undergoing treatment for leukemia does affect their mind in the exact way you are describing. My father has had it for five years now and ever since he began his battle, his mind does not always seem to be there. We asked the doctors about this and they stated that a lot of the drugs cause these sorts of problems. As far as what to do about it in the classroom, my only suggestion would be to work with the parents and provide some modifications for that child, in regard to extended time and the like.

I don’t know about leukemia in particular, but on general principles illness of any sort and medication of almost any sort will slow down the learning process — the body’s resources are being used up on healing and processing unnatural chemicals, and there just isn’t energy left to work on higher order intellectual functioning. After all, there are studies showing that even missing a few hours’ sleep or a couple of meals lowers your learning ability, so how much more would a major illness? And leukemia is such a nasty whole-body disease, and the chemotherapy drugs are so very dangerous and toxic, that even minor brain damage might be possible.
Medical doctors often see school from a therapeutic rather than an educational viewpoint — it is good for the kid to be in school with other kids, doing the kinds of things that other kids do. And with a disease as bad as leukemia, there is something to be said for this approach — why should the poor kid not only have to suffer physically but also then be cut off from child society? But the kid is in school for the sake of being in society, not necessarily for the sake of learning.
Educationally, however, I would tend to think that the kid might do well to repeat a year somewhere. A year might simply be lost to the treatment. Or, there might be a need for intensive summer or after-school tutoring for a few years. Naturally this would be something to work out with the family.

There is quite a bit of research to show that children treated for cancer do often develop LD. The treatment that kills the cancer cells can also affect brain cells.

I would like to have some of the references for this research.

[quote=”Anonymous”]There is quite a bit of research to show that children treated for cancer do often develop LD. The treatment that kills the cancer cells can also affect brain cells.[/quote]

Take a look at this google websearch:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22leukemia%22%2B%22learning+disabilities%22

Seems ld in math is common “side effect” of treatment.

—des