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A couple of years ago, Kathryn Moore, the director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at NYU Langone Health, came across a study that made her pause. Researchers had tracked the cardiovascular outcomes of breast cancer patients and found that among women with only one or two risk factors—such as family history, hypertension, or diabetes—30 percent experienced a cardiovascular event, a troubling statistic that jumped to 50 percent among women with three or four risk factors. Given how frequent these events were, “I wondered whether having a heart attack affected their cancer,” says Moore, “and I was surprised to find that no one had looked at this.”
Research has long supported a link between cancer treatments such as chemotherapy that can weaken the heart and subsequent cardiovascular disease in patients. The effectiveness of modern treatments means “patients are living longer, but they’re also experiencing complications,” says Moore, ...
