Comparison of American and European guidelines for cardio-oncology of heart failure

Heart failure is a complex clinical syndrome, whose signs and symptoms are caused by functional or structural impairment of ventricular filling or ejection of blood. Due to the interaction among anticancer treatment, patients’ cardiovascular background, including coexisting cardiovascular diseases and risk factors, and cancer itself, cancer patients develop heart failure. Some drugs for cancer treatment may cause heart failure directly through cardiotoxicity or indirectly through other mechanisms. Heart failure in turn may make patients lose effective anticancer treatment, thus affecting the prognosis of cancer. Some epidemiological and experimental evidence shows that there is a further interaction between cancer and heart failure. Here, we compared the cardio-oncology recommendations among heart failure patients of the recent 2022 American guidelines, 2021 European guidelines, and 2022 European guidelines. Each guideline acknowledges the role of multidisciplinary (cardio-oncology) discussion before and during scheduled anticancer therapy.