RESEARCH - MS patients may have lower cancer risk

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Multiple Sclerosis Patients Have Lower Cancer Risk

April 2, 2009 — A large population-based study suggests that people

with multiple sclerosis (MS) have a lower risk for cancer overall, but

may be at slightly higher risk of developing certain types of tumors.

Reporting in the March 31 issue of Neurology, researchers show that MS

patients have about a 10% lower cancer risk, and this effect is even

more pronounced among women. But some patients did seem more likely to

develop brain tumors or cancer of the urinary organs.

" We speculate that the lower risk for cancer among people with MS

could be a result of lifestyle changes or treatment following

diagnosis, " lead investigator Shahram Bahmanyar, MD, from the

Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, said in a news release. " The increase

in brain-tumor diagnoses may be due to brain inflammation, but this

finding may not reflect a real increase in cancer risk, as there is

some evidence that more frequent neurological investigations in these

patients mean that brain tumors are more likely to be found sooner. "

There may also be disease-related reasons that could explain the

increased risk for urinary-organ cancers, Dr. Bahmanyar noted. Chronic

irritation to those organs as a result of MS may heighten the cancer

risk, for example. But, he emphasized, the individual risk was modest,

and less than 0.2% of MS patients developed this cancer for every 10

years of follow-up.

Investigators studied the medical records of about 204,000 people and

another 20,000 with MS. Participants were from the Swedish general

population register.

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Read the whole article here:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/590530

Not an MD