BACKGROUND Doxorubicin is one of the most active cytotoxic agents in current use. It has proven efficacy in various malignancies either alone or combined with other cytocidal agents. The clinical usefulness of the anthracycline drug has been precluded by cardiac toxicity. Many therapeutic interventions have been attempted to improve the therapeutic benefits of the drug. Few, however, have been ...

BACKGROUND The use of anthracyclines in patients with cancer has been associated with the presence, even when standard doses were employed, of cardiac toxicity, most frequently after 5 years of therapy. Treatment of cancer during pregnancy remains a dilemma because cytotoxic therapy has been associated with the presence of severe side-effects. The outcome of children that received antracyclines...

Dog 1 developed ventricular asystole and apnoea thus followed a cardiac death. In the remaining 5 dogs apnoea preceded cardiac standstill. The blood gas values in all 6 animals made it unlikely that failure of the respiratory centre occurred because of primary pulmonary pathology. In animals 5, 8 and 9, cardiac output and related haemodynamic data suggest that apnoea resulted from inadequate bl...

Toxicity from the digitalis family of cardiac glycoside medications remains common. Successful treatment depends on early recognition; however, the diagnosis of potentially life-threatening toxicity remains difficult because the clinical presentation is often nonspecific and subtle. The hallmark of cardiac toxicity is increased automaticity coupled with concomitant conduction delay. Though no s...

Cardiovascular toxicity is unfortunately a potential short- or long-term sequela of breast cancer therapy. Both conventional chemotherapeutic agents such as anthracyclines and newer targeted agents such as trastuzumab can cause varying degrees of cardiac dysfunction. Type I cardiac toxicity is dose-dependent and irreversible, whereas Type II is not dose-dependent and is generally reversible wit...

The dose-limiting factor of cyclophosphamide (CPA) is cardiac toxicity.1 The maximum tolerated dose of CPA is approximately 200 mg/kg and fatal cardiac toxicity is rare at lower doses.1 However, two groups reported that same-day administration of cytarabine (Ara-C) and CPA increased the incidence of fatal cardiac toxicity.2,3 On the other hand, in the BEAC regimen, one of the most popular prepa...

Patients with left-sided breast cancer are at risk of cardiac toxicity because of cardiac irradiation during radiotherapy with the conventional 3-dimensional conformal radiotherapy technique. In addition, many patients may receive chemotherapy prior to radiation, which may damage the myocardium and may increase the potential for late cardiac complications. New radiotherapy techniques such as in...

The anthracycline antitumor antibiotics are important chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of leukemias, lymphomas, breast cancer, myeloma, small-cell lung cancer, sarcomas, bladder cancer, and pediatric solid tumors. However, the clinical usefulness of the anthracycline antibiotics is limited by their cardiac toxicity, and clinicians confront a clinical dilemma as they balance the efficac...

State-of-the-art therapy for beta-adrenergic receptor blocker and calcium channel antagonist toxicity is reviewed in the light of new insights into drug-induced shock. A brief discussion of pathophysiology, including cardiac, hemodynamic, and metabolic effects of cardiac drug toxicity, provides a foundation for understanding the basis of therapy. The major focus of this review is a critical eva...