Preoperative Management of Patients With Cardiovascular Diseases for Elective Cancer Surgery

Significant progress in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer resulted in a marked improvement in the survival of these patients. Declining mortality in acute cardiovascular diseases is accompanied by an increase in the proportion of patients with chronic cardiovascular pathology. Both trends resulted in a growing cohort of patients with concomitant oncology and cardiovascular disease, given rise to cardiooncology, a rapidly growing field. Cardio-oncology incudes a variety of clinical issues, particularly preoperative assessment of patients for cancer surgery. However, this section has been recently neglected in the recent guidelines. This review focuses on the preoperative management of patients with cardiovascular diseases for elective cancer surgeries. It reports the existing algorithm of assessing the risk of cardiac events in non-cardiac surgeries relatively to cancer patients. Current international and national guidelines were published in 2014 and, therefore, do not contain the latest evidences. Thus, this review summarizes all recent data and provides a modified and simplified preoperative management strategy for cancer patients. In particular, surgical risk assessment should be comprehensive, taking into account the complexity of the surgical procedures and the severity of comorbidity. The review discusses specific risk assessment scales proposed for different groups of cancer patients (for example, the ThRCRI scale in surgeries for non-small cell lung cancer). In addition, it contains various options for assessing the functional status of patients (stress tests, including spiroergometry, DASI index, assessment tables). Current recommendations on additional screening and preventive treatment of patients are summarized and addressed to the healthcare specialists and researchers studying perioperative risk assessment in cancer surgery.