Cardiovascular oncology: a new discipline inside internal medicine?

Cardiovascular disease and cancer incidence and prevalence have risen over the past few decades to become the leading causes of death. On the one hand, cancer patients will be treated with cardiotoxic chemotherapies; on the other, cardiovascular patients will receive a new diagnosis of cancer and will have to face treatments that may worsen their disease. Moreover, venous thromboembolism can commonly complicate the natural course of patients with cancer in an apparently spontaneous manner or can be triggered by a clinical event such as surgery, invasive procedures, a course of chemotherapy or radiotherapy and is known to be the second cause of death in these patients who also may need to be treated for pre-existing medical conditions or comorbidities. Thus, we introduce the concept of cardiovascular oncology (in the place of cardiooncology) to underline that the problems in this field are not limited to cardiotoxicity of chemotherapies and to the interaction between cardiologists and oncologists, and we focus on the role of the Internist, the only health care giver able to face the multiple problems that cancer patients may undergo.