While the treatment of various cancers using radiation therapy for conditions including Hodgkin’s disease is regarded as a “medical miracle”, patients are often unaware that radiation can negatively impact organs including the heart, the lungs and the esophagus. Specific to the heart, there is a strong association among radiation therapy and heart valve disease, coronary artery disorders, ascending aorta defects and pericardium issues.

This article describes the results of a study from the University of California San Francisco. It highlights one of the topics Dr. Micheal Stubblefield mentioned in his presentation at our conference. It comes from a paper that was published in the British Medical Journal Supportive and Palliative Care, July 2022. First author Steven W. Cheung, MD notes the marked incidence of hearing loss and tinnitus in survivors, owing to chemotherapy drugs that contained platinum as well as those that contained taxanes.

Death due to a second primary cancer occurred nearly twice as often among adolescent and young adult cancer survivors compared with the general population, according to study results published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Over the past several years, researchers have developed AI tools that have the potential to make cancer imaging faster, more accurate, and even more informative. And that’s generated a lot of excitement.

In this issue of the Journal, de Vries and colleagues examine the cause-specific late mortality among a multi-center Dutch cohort of Hodgkin lymphoma survivors.