Fatty coat on cancer drugs protects the heart

Cancer drugs wrapped in a fatty layer cause less heart damage than naked ones do, research in pigs finds. But the drugs, called anthracyclines, still harm the heart.

Patients treated with anthracyclines are 15 times as likely to experience heart failure — often years after treatment — and eight times as likely to die from it as people who have not received the drugs, says Mariann Gyöngyösi, a cardiologist at the Medical University of Vienna.