Allergic to Cancer?

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Allergic to Cancer?

Hay fever, dog, peanut and other allergies may protect sufferers from

certain types of brain tumors, a new study suggests. In surveys of

hospital patients, individuals with glioma--a common form of brain and

spinal cancer--were less likely than cancer-free individuals to report

having allergies, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers report

online February 7 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

Several teams had previously explored the link between allergies and

glioma, says UIC epidemiologist Bridget McCarthy, who led the study. Her

team set out to confirm these results, cobbling together a wide list of

variables. The researchers quizzed about 1,000 hospital patients with or

without cancer about their allergy histories. Of the 344 patients with

high-grade glioma, about 35 percent reported having been diagnosed with

one or more allergies in their lifetimes, compared with about 46 percent

of the 612 cancer-free respondents. About 10 percent of high-grade tumor

patients had three or more allergy diagnoses, as opposed to 22 percent

of the controls. " The more allergies you have, the more protected you

were, " McCarthy says.

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