In a study lasting 22 years, researchers followed children, adolescent and young adult cancer patients who were treated with the cancer drug doxorubicin, and found that damage to the heart can get progressively worse as time goes on. According to the University Medical Center at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands researchers, the damage to the heart from some cancer drugs is a well known fact but this is the first long-term study to track the effects of cancer drugs on the heart that might occur years later.
As a resut of this study, researchers recommend that all patients treated with drugs known as anthracyclines have life-long heart function monitoring. They emphasis, even with the study findings, that doxorubicin is a highly effective cancer treatment. In addition, today's cancer patients tend to receive lower doses of these cancer drugs, and cardioprotective drugs, such as dexrazoxane, were not available to cancer patients in the past.
This study will be published in Annals of Oncology.
1. An important issue, these long term side effects,
the longer the patient goes without a relapse back
into cancer, the more worring effects like heart risk are.
http://stylizedfacts.com/NSHD/
Posted at 1:19PM on Jul 22nd 2006 by Hodgkin's