Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
Click the orange button to the right to learn more about what you can start doing today.
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Cardiac Rehabilitation – Myeloma Survivor
Meta analyses demonstrate that Cardiac Rehabilitation reduces CVD mortal- ity and hospital admissions and improves health-related quality of life in patients with coronary heart disease.
Ouch. According to the article below, my newly diagnosed chemotherapy-induced cardiomyopathy (CIC-diagnosed 2019) will kill me before my multiple myeloma will (diagnosed 1994). I am the poster child for cardiac rehabilitation (CR).
On the one hand, I didn’t really get serious about cardiac-rehab until my diagnosis of CIC in early 2019. On the other hand, when I developed chronic Afib in the fall of 2010, I began a journey into researching and living a heart health lifestyle just as I had begun researching and living an anti-multiple myeloma lifestyle when I launched PeopleBeatingCancer.
I suspected that aggressive chemotherapy had damaged my heart. I just didn’t know how much damage nor how to heal it.
My point is that it took me a while to figure out that it was the late stage side effect of heart disease which clued me into the extent of my long-term and late stage side effects. Side effects caused by aggressive chemo and radiation at University Hospitals of Cleveland from my MM diagnosis in early ’94 through my end-stage diagnosis in September of ’97.
In my defense, my chemobrain addled mind thinks and processes info slowly…Better late then never I always say…
What have I learned about cardiac rehabilitation for multiple myeloma survivors with heart disease? Plenty.
Challenges:
- Like MM, chemo-induced heart damage is incurable according to conventional medicine…
- Like MM, conventional medicine will offer a bunch of therapies- all that provide some relief but that also come with side effects…
- Like MM, my choice, according to my cardiologists, is conventional, toxic, medications that simply slow my inevitable decline…
Solutions:
- Like my MM, I’ve decided to first utilize evidence-based, non-toxic heart health therapies before I even think about conventional side-effect laden therapies…
- Like my MM, evidence-based nutrition, supplementation and lifestyle therapies have slowly provided measurable improvement to my “incurable” heart disease…
- Like my MM, conventional diagnostic information is central to my long-term cardiac rehab…
According to my early 2020 echocardiogram, my ejection-fraction (EF) has improved from 40-45 to 50-55. My other heart problems (enlarged ascending aorta, enlarged aortic root) have stopped enlarging.
My version of cardiac rehabilitation is working!
I am no where near out-of-the-woods yet. However, I have learned from painful experience that conventional medicine is…ahhh…problematic. Knowing this, I am going to work the evidence-based, non-toxic approach before I even think about undergoing toxic meds.
If you are a cancer survivor with chemotherapy-induced cardiomyopathy (heart damage), heart issues, heart problems of any kind, scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
To Learn More about Chemotherapy-induced Heart Damage- click now
Thanks,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
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- Cancer Survivors and Mind-Body Therapy
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Cardio-Oncology Rehabilitation to Manage Cardiovascular Outcomes in Cancer Patients and Survivors
“Cardiovascular disease is a competing cause of death in patients with cancer with early-stage disease. This elevated cardiovascular disease risk is thought to derive from both the direct effects of cancer therapies and the accumulation of risk factors such as hypertension, weight gain, cigarette smoking, and loss of cardiorespiratory fitness. Effective and viable strategies are needed to mitigate cardiovascular disease risk in this population; a multimodal model such as cardiac rehabilitation may be a potential solution…
…As a result, there are >16.7 million cancer survivors in the United States today.1–4 Many of these individuals are at increased risk of morbidity and mortality from noncancer causes, predominantly cardiovascular disease (CVD). Specifically, cancer survivors living at least 5 years beyond diagnosis have a 1.3- to 3.6-fold increased risk of cardiovascular-specific mortality and a 1.7- to 18.5-fold increased incidence of CVD risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and dyslipidemia compared with age-matched counterparts with no cancer his- tory.5,6 The elevated risk of CVD in cancer survivors is likely the result of normal age-related pathologies coupled with the direct (eg, radiation, chemotherapy, tar- geted therapy) and indirect (eg, deconditioning, weight gain)7 effects of cancer therapy that extend across multiple systems (ie, whole-organism cardiovascular toxicity).8 CVD is likely to become even more pervasive in the oncology setting as a result of continued improvements in cancer-specific mortality in conjunction with the rapidly aging population.9..
Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR) has been defined as “the provision of comprehensive long-term services involving medi- cal evaluation, prescriptive exercise, cardiac risk factor modification, and education, counseling, and behav- ioral interventions.”10
The objectives of contemporary CR are to increase functional capacity (cardiorespiratory fitness [CRF]), to decrease anginal symptoms, to facili- tate cardiovascular risk reduction, to improve psychoso- cial well-being, and to reduce recurrent hospitalizations and the associated morbidity/mortality of CVD.10a Me- ta-analyses demonstrate that CR reduces CVD mortal- ity and hospital admissions and improves health-related quality of life in patients with coronary heart disease.1
RATIONALE FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF A MULTIMODAL CR FOR PATIENTS WITH CANCER
Traditionally, cardiovascular toxicity in cancer survivors has focused predominantly on the detection and man- agement of cardiocentric dysfunction (eg, declines in left ventricular ejection fraction), which predisposes to the development of overt heart failure.
The direct and indirect adverse consequences of anticancer therapeu- tics, however, extend beyond the heart to affect the entire cardiovascular-skeletal muscle axis. Indeed, CRF, an integrative assessment of global cardiovascular func- tion, declines during exposure to various systemic com- bination regimens and may not recover after treatment cessation.15–17…
Given the multisystem consequences of cancer therapy resulting in increased risk of morbid- ity and mortality, there is a strong rationale both to identify survivors at greatest risk and to deliver individu- alized interventions…