Clinical management of doxorubicin-induced heart failure

Doxorubicin-induced heart failure is a rare but serious illness due to the well-known treatment difficulties. Prevention strategies have not demonstrated the expected success and unfortunately, this specific type of heart failure does not respond well to the usual medical therapy as other kinds of heart failure. Therefore, surgical procedures may be necessary in some patients. Cardiac transplantation is performed in most cases but it requires the cure of the neoplastic disease. This usually requires a recurrence-free interval of several years which is associated with a high attrition rate in these patients due to their cardiac disease. Therefore, ventricular assist devices were implanted in selected patients. This review presents the most common procedures and discusses their efficacy as well as their clinical applicability.