Researcher Kirizawa and colleagues recently published a systematic review in the Supportive Care in Cancer on the importance of using heart rate variability (HRV) to investigate cardiac autonomic dysfunction in patients with leukemia [
1]. In the light of this study, it seems obvious that HRV will be used in cancer clinical practice, especially because HRV provided valuable information for patients under physiological and pathological conditions. Unfortunately, cardiac autonomic dysfunction is a widely underestimated risk in leukemia patients. With this letter to the editor, we would like to comment on the importance of systematic reviews as a form of evidence in research. We agree with the authors that some questions deserve to be answered regarding leukemia populations to better understand the late adverse effects of cancer and treatments on patients’ cardiac autonomic dysfunction. Moreover, we agree with researchers’ point of view on the importance of HRV in the diagnosis of patient’s cardiac autonomic dysfunction and its importance in clinical practice. However, the way these aspects were reported deserves to be discussed in this letter. …
