A new study reveals that the commonly used breast cancer treatment, radiation therapy, can increase a patient's risk for heart attack and death---according to a new study.
And researchers found that radiation therapy can penetrate its way to the heart and cause adverse effects even 20 years post-treatment.
The long-term health effects that cancer survivors are faced with have been the topic of other studies, but this is the latest study that addressed the issue.
And even though radiation therapy has the potential to prevent cancer from returning in a patient, it also causes damage to the heart---the study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports.
The research included analyzing data from 2,168 breast cancer patients who underwent radiation therapy between 1958 and 2001 in Sweden and Denmark and the research showed that there was an increased risk for heart disease regardless of the amount of radiation used during the treatment process.
"This is a major concern," said Ben Smith, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who was not involved in the study.
Smith also said that there are a large amount of women that "still have a significant portion of their heart in the path of the radiation beam."
The study found that women who received radiation in the left breast have a higher risk for developing heart disease because the area is closer to the heart compared to women who received the treatment in the right breast.
Researchers also reported that women with a pre-existing heart condition are also at a higher risk.
The study also found that heart-related medical issues were more prevalent during the first five to 10 years post-treatment.
The American Cancer Society reports that over 232,000 women in America will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and about 3 million will survive the disease.
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