Cooling Caps for Chemotherapy
Hair loss is common with chemotherapy. Cooling caps available at Reid Health may help you avoid it and boost your sense of control and confidence during a difficult time.
Making cancer less obvious
A cancer diagnosis brings many challenges, with hair loss one of its most visible. Losing your hair can feel like losing a part of yourself during an already difficult journey. Cooling caps for chemotherapy offer a way to reduce hair loss, helping you maintain your confidence and spirit during cancer treatment.
support for your journey
Cancer navigators to guide every step
We want you to feel supported at every step of your cancer treatment. Cooling caps are one of many resources we offer to help you feel like yourself, and your dedicated cancer navigator can connect you with other services you might need, whether that’s help paying your bills or managing nausea and other side effects.
Our goal is to ensure everyone with cancer in East Central Indiana and West Central Ohio has the support they need to navigate a cancer diagnosis with confidence.
What are cooling caps and how do they work?
Cooling caps are a type of scalp-cooling treatment. They help protect cells in your hair follicles by reducing blood flow to your scalp. Lower blood flow limits how much chemo reaches your scalp. As a result, you could lose less hair.
Understanding how chemotherapy works can also help you understand the benefit of cooling caps. Chemotherapy drugs attack rapidly dividing cells, like cancer cells. However, cells in your hair follicles also divide rapidly and can get damaged by chemotherapy, causing you to lose your hair. So, having less of the medication reach cells in your hair follicles might reduce hair loss.
Generally, you wear a cooling cap before, during, and after treatment. The exact time may depend on which chemotherapy medication, but most people wear the caps:
● For 30 minutes before an infusion
● During the entire infusion treatment
● For 1.5 to 2 hours afterward.
Paxman cooling caps
Reid offers the Paxman Scalp Cooling System. It uses a refrigeration device, which circulates coolant through a silicone inner cap. Another outer cap keeps the inner cap fitted tightly against your scalp.
These devices are different from manual cold caps you can buy online. Those cold caps typically need to be frozen and kept on dry ice until they’re worn. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the Paxman cooling cap and similar systems for people who meet certain criteria. They have not approved manual cooling caps.
Do you qualify for cooling cap therapy?
Cooling caps can help people with many cancer types, including breast cancer, limit hair loss during chemotherapy. Still, they aren’t right for everyone.
The caps are most effective if you use them as soon as you start treatment, so if you’re already receiving chemotherapy, you might not benefit. In addition, you can’t use them if you are receiving high-dose chemo to kill cells in your bone marrow (bone marrow ablation chemotherapy).
You also might not benefit or qualify for scalp cooling treatment if you have:
- A blood cancer, such as leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma or multiple myeloma
- Central nervous system cancer
- A history of or possible cancer on your scalp
- Liver disease, which can affect how your body processes chemotherapy drugs
- Skin cancer, including melanoma
- Squamous cell or small cell lung cancer