ABSTRACT
Tremendous advances have been made in the therapy of childhood cancer. It is now estimated that within the next 15 y 1 out of every 250 adults age 15 to 45 y will be a survivor of childhood cancer[1]. Therapy for most of these individuals will include the anthracycline antibiotics, a class of drugs known to have both acute and late cardiotoxicity. Previous exercise studies[2-10] have suggested that these survivors may have significant limitations of their exercise ability. However, several potential limitations occur in these earlier studies, such as small patient numbers, inclusion of patients during or shortly after completion of therapy, and inclusion of patients who received mediastinal irradiation, a confounding cardiotoxic agent. In an attempt to better assess exercise performance following cure of childhood malignancy, we evaluated patients at least 2 y following completion of therapy. All patients received anthracyclines as their only known cardiotoxic chemotherapeutic agent.
