Estrogen is involved in improvement of impaired cardiac glucose uptake in cancer patients

We previously demonstrated that inflammatory stress impaired cardiac glucose uptake, using fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (FDG-PET/CT) by showing that a proportion of patients with subtle FDG signals was remarkably increased compared with that of normal subjects. The current study assessed the inhibitory effects of cancer-associated stress on cardiac glucose uptake in female cancer patients, and compared the results with those obtained for healthy female subjects. Cardiac glucose uptake was decreased in female cancer, as indicated by the significantly higher number of patients with poor FDG uptake and the lower number of patients with high FDG uptake, compared with the number of healthy subjects with poor and high FDG uptake, respectively. These results suggest that cancer-associated stress inhibited cardiac glucose utilization. From the 78 female cancer patients, 13 oophorectomized patients, who underwent repeated postoperative follow-up examinations by FDG-PET/CT before and after receiving hormone replacement therapy (HRT) with estrogen derivatives, were analyzed to determine the effects of estrogen on cardiac glucose uptake. HRT increased a proportion of patients with high FDG signals to comparable in healthy subjects with high FDG uptake, whereas that of patients with poor FDG uptake decreased. These results suggest that estrogen can improve cardiac glucose uptake in cancer-resected and oophorectomized patients.