The Way Out From the Labyrinth of Anticancer Therapies for Patients with Breast Cancer: How Can We Improve Their Cardiac Safety and Quality of Life?

Patients with Breast cancer (BC) often experience a spectrum of adverse, anticancer therapy-related symptoms, which deteriorate their quality of life (QoL). Therefore, effective strategies for BC are needed. Personalized medicine offers many therapeutic options (e.g., targeted therapies) that can be tailored to the individual needs of a given patient. This chapter aims to briefly present typical side effects of current anticancer treatments, which often reduce the QoL of patients with BC and survivors. In particular, it addresses pain (including chemotherapy (CHT)-induced peripheral neuropathy (PN) and lymphedema), depression, cognitive dysfunction, premature menopause, and CHT-induced menopause. It focuses on the adverse effects of the BC therapies, such as chemotherapy (CHT), immunotherapy (IT), and some targeted therapies. In addition, several issues related to cardiovascular toxicity induced by anticancer treatments and cardioprotective measures for women with BC are addressed. This chapter also touches on the recent advances in precision medicine and provides some future directions, aimed at fulfilling unmet needs of patients with BC. The described approaches may be helpful in planning personalized treatment, facilitating the patient’s tolerability of many available anticancer therapies, optimizing the medication selection, and improving the patient’s QoL.

Keywords: Breast Cancer (BC), Chemotherapy (CHT), Cardiovascular toxicity, Cardioprotection, Cardio-oncology, Depression, Immunotherapy (IT), Pain, Peripheral neuropathy (PN), Personalized medicine approach, Precision medicine, Precision oncology, Quality of life (QoL), Targeted therapies.