Exploring how cancer and heart disease interact

As treatments for cancer and heart disease improve, more people are living longer. But there’s limited data on how, or if, these conditions interact with each other. 

For example, heart disease can limit available treatment options for cancer, and some treatments for cancer increase the risk of heart disease. 

In Leicester, Dr David Adlam is collecting a national dataset, derived from linking UK cardiovascular audits and cancer registries, to address important questions about how these diseases interplay.  This could inform guidelines to optimise patient care. 

This important project called VICORI (the Virtual Cardio-Oncology Research Initiative) is co-funded by Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation.