Effect of granulocyte-colony stimulating factor on systolic function of oncology patients.

e b ( 5 o the Editor: An important side effect of several widely used hemotherapeutic agents is cardiotoxicity and heart failure. Animal odels demonstrate that granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (GSF) may offer cardioprotection against doxorubicin-induced cardioyopathy (1–3), but human data substantiating this are lacking. To address this important issue, we conducted a retrospective ohort study investigating the impact of G-CSF on left ventricular jection fraction (EF) in oncology patients between 2007 and 2008 at he University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. We evaluated atients who received either cardiotoxic or noncardiotoxic chemotherpy and G-CSF to prevent chemotherapy-induced neutropenia. ardiotoxic drugs included anthracyclines and trastuzumab. G-CSF as administered daily 5 times after each chemotherapy cycle. We ncluded patients who: 1) received G-CSF as a part of the treatment; nd 2) had an echocardiogram before and after receiving at least 1 ose of G-CSF. For a control group, we evaluated patients who did ot receive G-CSF but who had 2 echocardiograms. Only transthoacic echocardiograms were included. For this analysis, we selected the owest reported EF determined by visual estimation. In addition, ther echocardiographic parameters, notably systolic and diastolic imensions, were collected. The primary outcome was the effect of G-CSF on change in left entricular EF between the baseline and follow-up echocardioram. Secondary outcomes included the impact of G-CSF on left entricular EF in patients receiving cardiotoxic chemotherapy ompared with those who did not receive cardiotoxic drugs. Baseline characteristics between the group that received G-CSF nd the control group were analyzed using a t test for continuous ariables and chi-square for categorical variables. For univariate nalysis, we used a paired t test to compare the baseline and