Left ventricular systolic dysfunction is a significant cause of morbidity among cancer patients in whom this unfortunate complication develops. Investigation and management of chemotherapy- and radiation-induced cardiomyopathy in the emerging field of cardio-oncology involves a multidisciplinary approach between cardiology and oncology departments. The purpose of this article is to provide a pr...

Breast cancer patients who present with only locoregional lymphatic metastases have good life expectancy after treatment with surgery and adjuvant anthracyclinecontaining chemotherapy. Anthracyclines, however, can induce cardiomyopathy, and this may become clinically manifest as chronic heart failure many years after exposure. As the occurrence of this side effect is dependent on the cumulative...

Objectives There is little information about arrhythmia burden in cancer survivors with chemotherapy-induced cardiomyopathy (CIC). We hypothesise that the rates and risk of arrhythmias will be similar in CIC when compared with other non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy (NICMO) aetiologies. Methods We retrospectively identified nine patients with CIC and an implantable defibrillator and 18 age and sex...

The combination of immunostimulatory agents with cytotoxic drugs is emerging as a promising approach for potentially curative tumor therapy, but advances in this field are hindered by the requirement of testing individual combination partners as single agents in dedicated clinical studies, often with suboptimal efficacy. Here, we describe for the first time a novel multipayload class of targete...

Chagas disease is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. It affects several million people, mainly in Latin America, and severe cardiac and/or digestive complications occur in ~30% of the chronically infected patients. Disease acute stage is mostly asymptomatic and infection goes undiagnosed. In the chronic phase direct parasite detection is hampered due to its concealed presence and diagnos...

RATIONALE Dilated cardiomyopathy is a leading cause of congestive heart failure and a debilitating complication of antineoplastic therapies. Despite disparate causes for dilated cardiomyopathy, maladaptive cardiac remodeling and decreased systolic function are common clinical consequences, begging an investigation of in vivo contractile dynamics in development and disease, one that has been imp...

• duchenne muscular dystrophy o onset 3 to 5 yrs o clinical § weakness o distribution § proximal > distal § symmetric § legs & arms § most involved muscles: adductor magnus in legs § relatively spared muscles: gracilis & sartorius o course § reduced motor function by 2 to 3 years § steady decline in strength: after 6 to 11 years o gowers sign: standing up with the aid of hands pushing on knees ...

background: muscle fibers overlying the intramyocardial segment of an epicardial coronary artery are termed myocardial bridge (mb). the aim of this study was to analyze the mid-term outcome of mb and to examine its possible association with angiographic findings and concomitant cardiac pathologies such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (hcm).   methods: from a total of 3218 patients admitted for c...

C ontinual advances in antineoplastic therapies have produced better cancer outcomes with 13.7 million cancer survivors in the United States in 2013 1. However, a significant number of survivors may develop cardiac disease as a result of cancer treatment, whether chemotherapy, radiation, or a combination of both. 2 Although radiation can cause significant heart disease 3 both alone and with che...