How to identify anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity early and reduce its clinical impact in everyday practice

Abstract

Discovered in the 1960s, anthracyclines are still among the most widely used chemotherapy drugs, but are associated with cardiotoxicity. To date, the main strategies that seem to be effective in reducing its incidence and severity include screening and treating preexisting cardiovascular risk factors, limiting the cumulative anthracycline dose with a preference for less toxic analogues, and administering cardioprotective drugs as early as possible after its diagnosis. A better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and greater refinement of the diagnostic tools at our disposal has led to considerable progresses in the detection of this serious side effect at a preclinical stage, allowing for prompt intervention. However, despite increasing efforts to identify early predictors of cardiotoxicity and growing evidence of the importance of cardiac biomarkers for this purpose, large randomized multicenter clinical trials are still lacking and so there is still no scientific agreement on the best approach for early diagnosis. Nonetheless, dosing troponin at each chemotherapy cycle and initiating, when it increases above the threshold, a therapy with renin–angiotensin–aldosterone system inhibitors and/ or β-blockers has proved to be an effective strategy in reducing the progression of microscopic myocardial damage into left ventricular remodelling and clinically evident cardiotoxicity.