Many highly effective agents , including anthracyclines and trastuzumab, are associated with well-described risks of short- and long-term cardiac events. As these agents are often used with curative intent, maximizing the benefits while reducing cardiac risks has become a priority in oncologic management, as well as monitoring for late-term toxicity.

Additionally, given the influx of novel biologic therapies designed to fulfill unmet medical needs, efforts are needed to promote strategies for risk detection and management to avoid dangerous toxicities which may impede development of and patient access to new agents.

Check these quite informative articles, and might helpful.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16473642 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15899625

http://www.uptodate.com/contents/cardiotoxicity-of-nonanthracycline-cancer-chemotherapy-agents

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/109/25/3122

Comprehensive guidelines:  http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/suppl_7/vii155.full

5-FU cardiac toxicty is in the line of Ischemic Heart Disease, it's very good remarking this, as many times this side effect is not known or adequately perceived, however, other anticancer drugs or therapies do have other cardiac toxicity mechanisms, the Anthracycline direct toxicty on cardiac muscular tissue, a factor limiting total accumulative dose of this drugs class, and mediated perhaps by Nascent Oxygen Species, is long ago known; even in the early days, when Dexrazoxane wasn't known, some small clinical studies proposed Vit-E dosing or Digitalization previous to the Anthracycline as an efficacious way to reduce the incidence and severity of Anthracycline Cardiac toxicity.

Somebody in an Oncology Congress remarked, about the 3% incidence of Heart Failure in Breast cancer patients having received an Anthracycline as Adjuvant therapy, that: 'Heart Failure is an ugly way of diying'.

Ciclophosphamide has also cardiac toxicity, specially in patients receiving also chest Radiation Therapy, and the list of potential Cardiovascular side effects of targeted agents, from pleural effusion to miocardiopathy to hypertension is quite long.

A tactic I'd suggest for a search yielding the Cardiovascular Side Effects of AntiCancer Drugs is obtaining a list of the compounds used for this purpose, some Oncologist's organizations as ESMO do have booklets or documents about anti-cancer agents for teaching purposes, and then, entering one at a time the product name and the added search words 'cardiac', or 'cardiovascular', or 'heart', and 'toxicity' or 'side effects', in something as EntrezPubMed, or the International toxicology, drugs or chemicals databases.

This approach is quite time-consuming, but I guess this is a very thorough approach for knowing the Cardiac Toxicity of Anti-Cancer products, besides the technical information files written for practitioners, and package inserts for patients, once upon a time, the package inserts of drug packs sold in Spain were not addressed to patients, but to physicians, so most patients didn't understand the too technical content, this being risky.

Hi there,

I would agree to all of you. However there is a common end trunk of all these toxicities and this is LVEDp = left ventricular end diastolic pressure. There is one drug which lowers specifically the LVEDp and reduces ventricular arrythmias- this is ranolazine which can be given in beforehand of any clinical detoriation. Beside this ,,specific'' treatment physical training is a good pretreatment for any cardiac toxic side effect. In general you should follow the rules of a cardiac consultant.

Many highly effective agents , including anthracyclines and trastuzumab, are associated with well-described risks of short- and long-term cardiac events. As these agents are often used with curative intent, maximizing the benefits while reducing cardiac risks has become a priority in oncologic management, as well as monitoring for late-term toxicity.

Additionally, given the influx of novel biologic therapies designed to fulfill unmet medical needs, efforts are needed to promote strategies for risk detection and management to avoid dangerous toxicities which may impede development of and patient access to new agents.