查看文章

Anthracycline-based chemotherapy, which improves survival for patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, is often withheld from elderly patients because of its cardiotoxicity. We studied the cardiac effects of doxorubicin in a population-based sample of older patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).

Among patients age ≥ 65 years diagnosed with DLBCL from 1991 to 2002 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results–Medicare database, we developed logistic regression models of the associations of doxorubicin with demographic, clinical, and cardiac variables. We then developed Cox proportional hazards models of the association between doxorubicin and subsequent congestive heart failure (CHF), taking predictors of CHF into account.

Of 9,438 patients with DLBCL, 3,164 (42%) received doxorubicin-based …