ABSTRACT
Therapeutic thoracic radiotherapy has been demonstrated to injure the cardiovascular (CV) system and to cause a broad range of cardiac complications with different manifestations and degrees of severity, many of which have a progressive nature. In radiation-associated CV toxicity, absolute risk appears to increase with increasing follow-up time after exposure. The long latency between radiation exposure and the development of symptomatic heart disease prevents the assessment of the benefits of modern Hodgkin’s lymphoma (HL) therapy settings within a practical time scale. Esophageal cancer patients, as lung cancer patients, are characterized by poorer prognosis and higher radiation doses to the heart when compared to breast cancer and HL patients; and as for lung cancer patients, data on cardiac morbidity following radiation treatment of esophageal cancer are scarce. The definition and contouring of heart vessels and coronary arteries can be time consuming and prone to inter- and intra-operator variations with concrete risks of structure misclassification.
