The phone lines at Penguin Cold Caps are ringing off the hook, or in business speak, “We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls due to our appearance on Good Morning America.” While the producer/supplier of the cold caps was not named in the GMA story, the idea that an icy head cap might prevent chemotherapy-induced hair loss seems to have sent some women running for the phone.
While still in clinical trials and little known in the United States, chemotherapy cold caps have been more widely used and studied in Europe. The headgear is stored at temperatures well below freezing and worn before, during, and after chemotherapy sessions. The freezing temperature constricts the blood vessels supplying blood to the hair follicles, thereby limiting the ability of the follicles to absorb the chemotherapy drugs.
“You essentially put the hair follicles in hibernation,” said Shirley Billigmeier, breast cancer survivor and cofounder of The Rapunzel Project, a nonprofit with a mission to increase American women’s access to cold caps. “The minute you have an option, your outlook switches,” said Billigmeier.
Patients need to rent the cold caps from the manufacturer, usually through a hospital intermediary. During chemotherapy, the caps are changed approximately every thirty minutes in order to maintain the optimal temperature of twenty-two degrees below zero Farenheit. It takes either a biomedical freezer or about 159 pounds of dry ice to maintain the caps at that temperature. Only a couple of hospitals in the United States currently have biomedical freezers.
Billigmeier had to get through her first chemotherapy and cold cap treatment with coolers of dry ice and a team of supporters. With seven family members and friends on hand to carry coolers and change the caps, Billigmeier got through her first treatment and returned for a second with a full head of hair. Friends and supporters of Billigmeier ultimately raised the funding to purchase a biomedical freezer for Abbot Northwestern, the Minnesota hospital where she was being treated. The cold caps go on about an hour before treatment and stay on for four hours following treatment, so cold-cap users are looking at long days of treatment with no guarantee that the caps will work.
