Volume 140, Issue 1, July 2014

Editor's Highlight: Chemotherapeutics are the epitome of the medical double-edged sword. These agents must be sufficiently toxic to eradicate cancerous cells, but in doing so, non-target tissues are often damaged. One prime example is the damage to the heart tissue after treatment with anthracyclines, such as doxorubicin. Damage to cardiac tissue during treatment leads to an increased rate of heart failure in cancer survivors. As such, it is important to better understand the structural and functional sequelae of treatment on the myocardium. Cove-Smith, Woodhouse, and coworkers employed a battery of cardiac measures along with sophisticated multi-modal cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) to reveal adverse cardiac consequences after doxorubicin treatment. Key findings include early functional deficits as measured by CMR, as well as subcellular myofibrillar damage and mitochondrial degeneration that occurred well before overt cardiac myocyte degeneration. —Lu Cai and Gary W. Miller