Matthew Matasar is a hematology and oncology specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He has a Translational Research Program grant through The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and is investigating which Hodgkin lymphoma survivors are at greater risk for developing heart disease after receiving radiation therapy to the chest and what diagnostic tests are best.
What kind of research do you do?
There’s been a lot of progress in the treatment of Hodgkin lymphoma, but the treatments we use to cure the disease can lead to health problems later in life. Think of giving treatment for the disease as tossing a rock into a pond from the shore. The rock sinks to the bottom quickly, but it can take a long time for the ripples to reach you at the shoreline. Late effects from treatment are like that – it can take years, or even decades, before they become apparent. But we know that patients who get certain treatments are at increased risk, statistically, for a range of potentially serious medical illnesses. My research focuses specifically on trying to better understand who is at greater risk for getting heart disease after radiation therapy to the chest and, more importantly, what are the best tests available at finding heart disease before actual damage to the heart has occurred.
What is novel and innovative about your approach?
Our study will bring in as many as 200 long-term survivors of Hodgkin lymphoma who received radiation therapy to the chest at our center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. This will be the largest study of adult survivors of Hodgkin lymphoma ever performed. What’s more, we’re limiting this work to patients who don’t already have a diagnosis of heart disease. We’re looking only at healthy patients, because we’re interested in learning how to identify heart disease before heart damage occurs (seeing heart problems after the damage is done is, as you might imagine, much easier). All survivors will undergo two types of testing. First, a cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cardiac MRI) both resting and after giving medicine to “stress” the heart, and second, an ultrasound of the heart (echocardiogram) both resting and after running on a treadmill.