It becomes critical to tackle upfront the health problems that can crop up years or even decades later.” The chemotherapeutic drugs they took years ago can cause premature heart failure or other cardiac issues. “For these survivors, these late-treatment effects are hidden wounds that they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. “Cancer has shaped these survivors but does not define them,” said Lipshultz, who also is president of UBMD Pediatrics and a consultant with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. The goal was to determine if dexrazoxane reduced chemotherapy-related heart damage without compromising the anti-cancer effects of the chemotherapy.
Some of them were randomized to receive dexrazoxane before every dose of doxorubicin. All of the children in these trials received the chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin, which is known to cause damage to the heart. The new study included 1,308 newly diagnosed patients with cancer who were enrolled in National Cancer Institute-supported clinical trials between 19 in 167 institutions around the world.
In preclinical models, Lipshultz and his colleagues had previously found that dexrazoxane was the most consistent cardioprotective agent, a finding that was subsequently confirmed in their clinical studies. “This is why this paper is so important, because it examines, for the first time, these longer term effects of dexrazoxane.” Conger Goodyear Professor and Chair of Pediatrics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. Lipshultz, MD, senior author on the paper and A. “The longer term effects of dexrazoxane had not been previously established, due to the short time it has been in clinical practice since the late 1990s,” said Steven E. The median time since cancer diagnosis was 18.6 years. The paper examined the long-term outcome among children newly diagnosed with cancer who had participated in clinical trials focused on dexrazoxane. Chow, MD, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In many cases, chemotherapies to cure the cancer are supplemented with drugs designed to curb the potential damage that chemotherapy can do, either in the short term or later when the patient is an adult.Ī new study published in Cancer and authored by researchers at multiple institutions, including the University at Buffalo, demonstrates that dexrazoxane, which is administered to pediatric cancer patients in order to curb the cardiotoxicity of a key chemotherapy drug, has no adverse impacts on these patients, even nearly 20 years later.įirst author on the paper is Eric J. – The delicate balance between using powerful drugs to cure cancer while mitigating damage to healthy tissue is all the more critical when the cancer patient is a child.
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