The subject of this paper is to analyze the impact of radiotherapy and anthracyclines on the cardiovascular system, based on a survey of contemporary literature. Currently, high efficiency of anticancer therapies has increased the rate of survival in patients treated for cancer. It should be emphasized, however, that these treatments damage not only the affected but also the healthy tissue. Con...

Anthracyclines are among the most used and effective anticancer drugs. Their activity has been attributed to DNA double-strand breaks resulting from topoisomerase II poisoning eviction of histones select sites in genome. Here we show that extensively anthracyclines Doxorubicin, Daunorubicin Epirubicin, decrease transcription of nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB)-dependent gene targets, but not inte...

The multidrug resistance protein (MRP) has been shown to mediate ATP-dependent efflux of anticancer agents of diverse structure, such as daunorubicin (DNR), vincristine and etoposide. Thus, this protein does confer a multidrug resistant phenotype to cancer cells, similar to P-glycoprotein (Pgp). The substrate specificity of both transporter proteins is partly overlapping but is otherwise very d...

Due to the low occurrence of cancer during pregnancy, limited data are available about outcome of infants exposed to chemotherapy in utero. We report the case of a newborn who developed transient ventricular hypocinesia and late-onset infection after in utero exposure to four epirubicin cycles for pregnancy-associated breast cancer. Moreover, we provide an overview of literature on neonatal out...

Chemotherapy extravasation remains an accidental complication of chemotherapy administration and may result in serious damage to patients. We review in this article the clinical aspects of chemotherapy extravasation and latest advances in definitions, classification, prevention, management and guidelines. We review the grading of extravasation and tissue damage according to various chemotherape...

Over the past forty years, anthracyclines and ellipticines have attracted attention as promising cytostatics. In this review, we focus on their mechanisms of cytoxicity, DNA-damaging effects and adverse side-effects. We also summarize ways to enhance the therapeutic effects of these drugs together with a decrease in their adverse effects. Current drug design strategies are focused on drug bioav...

Anthracyclines play an important role in treatment of variety types of cancer due to their high effectiveness and broad spectrum of activity. However, a major limitation of their use is the dose-limiting cardiotoxicity. The inability to predict and prevent anthracycline cardiotoxicity is in part due to the fact that the molecular and cellular mechanisms remain controversial and incompletely und...

Background Anthracyclines and Herceptin are well known amongst chemotherapeutic agents to cause cardiotoxicity. Anthracyclines, particularly in combination with, Herceptin are seen in studies to cause cumulative, dose-related, progressive myocardial damage with decrease in left ventricular(LV) ejection fraction (EF) ultimately leading to clinical heart failure, which can be irreversible. There ...