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What Is Cardiac Angiosarcoma?

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Virgil Abloh, the celebrated fashion designer, died at 41 after being diagnosed with the rare cancer. Here’s what we know about it.
On Sunday, Virgil Abloh, a noted designer and artistic director of men’s fashion at Louis Vuitton, died at 41 in Chicago after a two-year battle with cardiac angiosarcoma. According to a statement released on his Instagram account, Mr. Abloh was diagnosed with the rare cancer in 2019 and underwent a number of treatments before he died. First described by doctors in 1934, cardiac angiosarcoma is a rare form of cancer that causes cells inside the blood vessels of the heart to multiply and form tumors. The cancerous cells are often found in blood vessels lining the musculature of the wall of the heart, said Dr. Robert Maki, a medical oncologist and the clinical director of the Sarcoma Program at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. These cancers are part of a larger family of cancers called sarcomas, which affect the connective tissues that support and surround other parts of the body, including muscle, fat and blood vessels. Angiosarcomas are a kind of sarcoma that specifically afflict cells that line blood vessels, and cardiac angiosarcomas are angiosarcomas that occur within or around the heart. Cardiac angiosarcomas that begin in the heart are known as primary cardiac angiosarcomas, whereas cancers that form elsewhere and then spread to the heart are secondary cardiac angiosarcomas. It’s unclear which kind Mr. Abloh had, but it’s likely it was primary, said Dr. Sumeet Mitter, a cardiologist at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, because if the tumor had originated elsewhere it would probably be described differently. Angiosarcomas are aggressive and can also spread, or metastasize, to other parts of the body, including the lungs, liver and bone marrow, Dr.

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