Cardiac Failure in Malignant Disease.

Cardiac failure attributable to malignant disease is generally accepted as being caused either by lymphangitis carcinomatosa or by impaction of tumour emboli in the pulmonary vascular bed. Standard textbooks (Wood, 1956; Anderson, 1961) make no mention of other cardiac lesions which may occur in malignancy and which may be responsible for the development of heart failure. There are some less well-known causes of cardiac failure in malignant disease, and here I report five such cases and refer briefly to some problems of pathogenesis and management.