Nowadays, magnetic hyperthermia constitutes a complementary approach to cancer treatment. The use of magnetic particles as heating mediators, proposed in the 1950s, provides a novel strategy for improving tumor treatment and, consequently, patient quality of life. This review reports a broad overview about several aspects of magnetic hyperthermia addressing new perspectives and the progress on relevant features such as the ad hoc preparation of magnetic nanoparticles, physical modeling of magnetic heating, methods to determine the heat dissipation power of magnetic colloids including the development of experimental apparatus and the influence of biological matrices on the heating efficiency.Comment: 104 pages, 28 figures. Manuscript accepted for publication in Applied Physics Review

The adoption of magnetic hyperthermia as either a stand-alone or adjunct therapy for cancer is still far from being optimised due to the variable performance found in many iron oxide nanoparticle systems, including commercially available formulations. Herein, we present a reproducible and potentially scalable microwave-based method to make stable citric acid coated multi-core iron oxide nanoparticles, with exceptional magnetic heating parameters, viz. intrinsic loss parameters (ILPs) of up to 4.1 nH m(2) kg(-1), 35% better than the best commercial equivalents. We also probe the core-to-core magnetic interactions in the particles via remanence-derived Henkel and ΔM plots. These reveal a monotonic dependence of the ILP on the magnetic interaction field Hint, and show that the interactions are demagnetising in nature, and act to hinder the magnetic heating mechanism.