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Has anyone taken the targeted therapy osimertinib (Tagrisso)?
Lung Cancer | Last Active: Jun 16 6:00pm | Replies (139)Comment receiving replies
Cardio-oncology sounds perfect for me. Better yet: a cardiologist who specializes in the heart's electrical system. Keck Medical of USC has/had such a specialist who treated my husband, but I'm not at Keck. In any event my concern about my QTc has lessened since the Chief of Cardiology reviewed my ECGs and essentially said the QTc result calculated by the machine is only part of the story. He looked at the U-waves and said he didn't see a QTc problem. His analysis was sent to my oncologist, and now I'm wondering if he's going to re-evaluate the validity of the machine's calculations. Tagrisso is known to have heart-related side effects and when the ECG machine produces results that align with expectation, the conclusion is apparent. Or is it? The Chief of Cardiology ignored the Tagrisso connection and simply evaluated the ECG scans. If my next QTc results continue moving down, all of this may well be moot for me. But the question remains (at least in my head): what should oncologists make of the ECG results calculated by the machine?
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@1soc1soc, I've been on Tagrisso for 3 and a half years now. My Oncologist has always said he plans to keep me on it "until the negative side effects become unbearable." Not being able to afford it is one of those negative effects. But the possibility of heart damage with long-term use is right up there. I pressed him for details and he said it can either be muscular or electrical degeneration. At first, I was getting MUGA scans every 3 months, along with my brain MRI, CAT scan, and bloodwork. In my case, he stopped my MUGA scans after 2 years because my ejection fraction actually went up; plus, I'm also seeing a Cardiologist who has taken over monitoring my heart.
I haven't seen a study linking Tagrisso to short-term heart problems, but there is a link, and everybody's body is different.
If you have the time to do your own research, you can join the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer at iaslc.org. Check out 'Lung Cancer 360' for more information than any of us lay people could ever process! The field is advancing very rapidly. Best of luck to you.