Rapid development of anticancer treatments in recent years has greatly improved prognosis of cancer patients. However, with extension of survival time of cancer patients, various short-term and long-term side effects brought about by anticancer treatments, especially cardiotoxicity, have become increasingly prominent. Nonetheless, at present, there is few diagnostic methods with extremely high sensitivity and specificity to detect and accurately predict whether patients with anticancer treatment will experience cardiovascular complications. Inflammation, fibrosis and oxidative stress are considered to be important mechanisms involved in cardiotoxicity anticancer treatments. The cardiovascular biomarkers having the ability to predict and detect cardiovascular dysfunction earlier than clinical symptoms as well as left ventricular ejection fraction monitored by echocardiography, are of great value to timely treatment adjustment and prognosis evaluation. Cardiac troponin T/I and brain natriuretic peptide/N-terminal prohormone of brain natriuretic peptide have been routinely used in clinical practice to monitor cardiotoxicity, and some new biomarkers such as soluble suppression of tumorigenecity-2, myeloperoxidase, growth differentiation factor-15, galectin-3, endothelin-1, have potential in this area. In the future, larger-scale experimental studies are needed to provide sufficient evidences, and how to detect them quickly and at low cost is also a problem to be dealed with.
Keywords: anticancer treatments; biomarkers; cardiotoxicity; review.