Cancer and cardiovascular diseases are the two most common causes of death globally.
Cancer and CVD account for 2/3 of all disease related mortality globally and they frequently coexist.
More than 40% of patients with lung cancer, 30% with hematologic malignancies, 20% with breast cancer and 25% of patients with colon cancer have prevalent cardiovascular disease.
CVD is the leading cause of death in cancer survivors, largely attributable to exposure to chemotherapeutic agents, radiotherapy, and immunodulatory therapies used to treat patients with cancer, along with new cardiovascular risk factors.
Therapies for cancer can superimpose on pre-existing CVD risk factors to worsen cardiovascular outcomes.
Patients with newly diagnosed cancer are 2-3 fold greater risk of incident myocardial infarction or ischemic stroke compared without cancer.
Patients treated with radiotherapy have a risk increase of 76.4 cases of coronary heart disease and 125.5 cases of cardiac death for 100,000 person-years.
There is increasingly common encounters of patients with cancer who have manifestations of coronary artery disease that have acute coronary syndromes, or require elective myocardial revascularization for safe surgical treatment of their cancer.
The type of revascularization surgery or percutaneous coronary intervention depends on indication, age, comorbidities, complexity of coronary artery disease, bleeding risk, and overall cancer prognosis.
Nearly one in 10 patients indergoing PCI in the US have current or previous cancer, with worse short-term clinical outcomes compared with patients without cancer.