WOMEN with early breast cancer who have their tumours surgically removed often wonder whether the potential benefits of chemotherapy are actually worth the suffering involved. To find out what women who had already had been through chemotherapy for early breast cancer thought, a team of researchers from Europe, the US and Australia asked more than 2,600 of them to fill in questionnaires about how the chemotherapy made them feel. The women reported that while chemotherapy definitely had a negative impact on their quality of life at the time, these negative effects were transient and once the treatments were completed they had no apparent lasting effect on quality of life.