Patients taking cancer medications may develop severe heart problems
Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors that are intended to treat various types of cancer may in rare cases cause patients to develop severe heart damage, the New York Times reports.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Nov. 3, found that fewer than 1 percent of patients taking checkpoint inhibitors have had heart trouble. However, several patients have died after taking the drugs.
The FDA has approved four checkpoint inhibitors to treat six types of cancer. The drugs are ipilimumab (Yervoy), nivolumab (Opdivo), pembrolizumab (Keytruda) and atezolizumab (Tecentriq).
“This is something oncologists should be aware of,” Jedd D. Wolchok, MD, of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told the New York Times. “It’s rare, but the fact that people have died from it is a reason for us to try to spare them that toxicity.”
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Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.