Survivors of childhood cancer who received certain types of treatment are at dramatically increased risk of dying from a heart-related condition later on, new research shows.
Specifically, patients who had received radiation to the heart or had been given the chemotherapy drug anthracycline were many times more likely to die of heart disease compared to the general population, Dr Florent de Vathaire of Institut Gustav Roussy in Villejuif, France and colleagues found.
For two decades, de Vathaire and colleagues note, doctors have known that radiation therapy and chemotherapy may up the risk that childhood cancer survivors will develop another cancer later on.
To investigate, the researchers looked at 4,122 childhood cancer survivors who had been diagnosed before 1986 in France and the UK. All of them had survived for at least five years. Follow-up lasted 27 years, on average, but some patients had been followed for as long as 60 years. By the end of 2002, 603 of the study participants had died, according to a report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
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