
For the millions of people who could face a cancer diagnosis this year, it's vital to have all therapeutic options available.
But in some cases, the drugs used to treat cancer can cause other health problems during treatment or later. One example is a class of drugs called anthracyclines, which are derived from bacteria found in Italian soil decades ago. This group of about six chemotherapy drugs has been used since the 1960s to treat leukemia, lymphoma, sarcoma and breast cancer, as well as other cancers that have spread from their original site. But a serious side effect of anthracyclines is heart damage either during treatment — which means patients must stop using it — or weeks, months or even years later. This heart damage can decrease the quality and duration of a former cancer patient's life.
To find the best path for care, a team of clinician-researchers and discovery scientists report on a potential way to prevent or heal heart damage when anthracyclines are used to treat cancer. The paper is published in Circulation Research.
Read the rest of the article on the Discovery's Edge blog.
____________________________________________
Other Mayo Clinic medical research websites:
To glimpse the future of medicine, step inside Mayo Clinic's cutting-edge Center for Individualized Medicine. There, physicians, researchers, data scientists, artificial intelligence engineers and bioethicists are ...
Mayo Clinic physician-scientists are working on regenerative biotherapeutics such as orthobiologics and other regenerative bioinjectables to bring advanced procedures to more patients. Orthobiologics are biological agents ...
In 2018, a male patient in his 60s began experiencing chest pains, which turned out to be caused by multiple blood clots in his lungs. ...