Anthracycline and Cancer

So this article talks about anthracyclines and the role they play in treating many childhood cancers. Anthracyclines are a class of drugs used in cancer chemotherapy derived from Streptomyces bacteria. Although anthracyclinescan help to get rid of the cancer, they are quite harmful to the heart. The effects on the heart can be seen while treatment is going on or even many years after treatment has ended. Before deciding to use anthracyclinesone, one should be familiar with its antitumor effects and cardiotoxic effects.

 

To see what would be better, scientists conducted a series of tests in order to be able to compare antitumour efficacy of treatment including or not including anthracyclines in children with several different childhood cancers. Researchers discovered that at the moment evidence is not strong enough to say that anthracyclines have an increased antitumour effect in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) as compared to treatment without anthracyclines. However, there's some suggestion saying that anthracyclins do have an increased antitumor effect. In order to make a definite conclusion on anthracyclin effect on ALL, more research and tests need to be done. Researchers only found limited data on Wilms' tumour, habdomyosarcoma/undifferentiated sarcoma, Ewing's sarcoma, non‐Hodgkin lymphoma, and heptoblastoma, so they could not draw any conclusions. This is a relatively new concept, so at the moment there is no data for other childhood cancers. Although a general link between anthracyclins and childhood cancers has been shown, more high quality research needs to be done before definite conclusions can be drawn.