Sometimes the unintended consequences of a treatment can seem worse than the disease.
That's certainly the case for patients who develop chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity — a severe side-effect that can lead to heart failure and the discontinuation of anti-cancer treatment.
Now, University of Alberta research published in Nature Communications offers hope for protecting the heart during treatment and also attacking cancer more effectively.
The research team identified a biomarker to predict which patients will be most susceptible to cardiotoxicity and revealed the mechanism behind the heart damage — zeroing in on potential new targets for treatment.
"Some chemotherapy drugs interfere with the DNA replication of cancer cells and cause them to die, which is why they are good therapies. But they can also cause irreversible damage to heart cells," says principal investigator Gopinath Sutendra, associate professor and co-associate chair of research for the department of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, and Canada Research Chair in Cardio-Oncology and Molecular Medicine.
"Our goal is for a patient to be able to come in and, before they're even treated with chemotherapy, we can predict based on what we see in their blood that they may have a higher chance of getting cardiotoxicity or not," Sutendra says. "That in itself will be beneficial because we will now know what types of therapeutics to give. We really want to prevent any damage to the heart."
Death due to cardiovascular disease is twice as likely for cancer patients as for the general population, and cardiotoxicity is a leading cause of mortality among cancer survivors.
Unlike the DNA damage caused by chemotherapy to fast-growing cells in the hair or lining of the gut, heart cells are "terminally differentiated," which means they can't just start to regrow once the chemo stops, so the damage can be permanent.
