Fatty coat on cancer drugs protects the heart
Pigs still have some cardiac damage from the treatment
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. She presented the researchin Vienna December 5 at EuroEcho-Imaging, the annual meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging.