Susan Slovin, MD, PhD: Let’s talk about the cardiovascular and metabolic side effects in more detail. How do we manage our patients with prostate cancer who are already on androgen deprivation therapy? I, as a medical oncologist, usually prefer to work with a cardiologist—or an internist or a primary care physician—to help these patients maintain their health.

Dipti Gupta, MD, MPH: Thank you, Dr. Slovin. You’ve set up the stage perfectly for me. As I introduce myself, I’m sharing this podium with an oncologist. What exactly is a cardiologist doing here today? I am part of the Cardiology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I represent a relatively new, but rapidly growing, subspecialty discipline called cardio-oncology. As cardio-oncologists, we basically take care of patients before, during, and after their cancer therapy. One of our main goals is to help provide patients with safe effective cancer therapy in the context of cardiovascular disease. What we don’t want to do is trade cancer with heart disease, right?

So, in the context of this talk, I will focus on the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease in patients receiving androgen deprivation therapy. In the context of cardio-oncology, itself, there’s a lot more that we do. We participate and collaborate very, very closely with oncologists and other subspecialists. We monitor for early cardiotoxicity. We manage all kinds of cardiovascular toxicity, whether it be hypertension, coronary disease, or heart failure. We provide preoperative assessment for cancer surgery. We investigate suspected cardiac invasion by tumors and help design trials with cardiovascular endpoints so that we don’t realize 5, 10 years down the road that there was a toxicity signal that we were just too late to pick up.

Transcript Edited for Clarity