“As many as three-quarters of all patients treated for cancer will have received therapies known to have adverse effects to the cardiovascular system,” according to Steven Lipshultz, Editor-in-Chief of Cardio-Oncology.

The onset and severity of these adverse effects vary from case to case – sometimes they aren’t seen until many years later.

Cardio-oncology is an emerging field in medicine that looks at the effects of cancer treatment on the cardiovascular system. The ultimate aim of the field is to find a balance between the efficacy of cancer treatments and reducing the cardiovascular problems that can result from those treatments.

The editors of the new journal Cardio-Oncology, Steven Lipshultz, Joseph Carver and Giorgio Minotti, talk to us about their field in this podcast – its origins and future, the scale of the problem and how it affects patients.

https://soundcloud.com/biomedcentral/cardio-oncology-or-how-cancer-treatments-affect-the-heart