Vitamin e combination with nutrition supplement can reduce heart disease after chemotherapy

Lire en français Chemotherapy has saved and extended many lives, but its potential include many serious conditions, including heart disease. A team of South African and Egyptian researchers

studied 74 female patients with breast cancer attending the King Abdul-Aziz Hospital in Saudi Arabia. The paper, published in the _Journal of Oncology Pharmacy Practice_, looks into the use

of a combination of vitamin E and the nutritional supplement, levocarnitine, to reduce cardiotoxicity associated with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin. Researchers studied patients over the

four-cycle chemotherapy period (approximately 84-90 days) and found the combination to be both safe and tolerable in preventing acute cardiac damage. It is known that doxorubicin, for

instance, interferes with the function of carnitine – a substance produced by the body and important for heart and other functions – inside the heart muscle. Some studies estimate that

cardiotoxicity in patients receiving 700 mg/m² of doxorubicin has an incident rate of around 48%. Heart damage as a result of certain cancer drugs has been said to have become a leading

cause of death during and in the years following treatment. The combination of vitamin E and levocarnitine is among the treatments being explored to prevent certain types of cardiotoxicity.

Levocarnitine is typically used to prevent further damage to the cardiac tissue, although its role in heart disease is still being debated. The aim of the study was to fill the gap in the

literature around the value and safety of using vitamin E and levocarnitine in combination as a preventative measure. Iman Moustafa led the research as part of her doctoral studies at the

University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The study had some limitations, however, as it was relatively small and did not look into long-term outcomes, say the authors.