The Deathly Connection Between Asthma and Cancer

Asthma affects more than 292 million people worldwide (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Key facts about Asthma

Go to source). Lung cancer is responsible for about 2 million deaths and is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Are these two related? Patients with asthma are almost one-and-a-half times more likely to develop cancer than those who don’t have the respiratory disease, a new University of Florida research study has found (2^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Cancer incidence after asthma diagnosis: Evidence from a large clinical research network in the United States

Go to source).

Researchers analyzed a large statewide database of health records and administrative claims to reach their findings.

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Asthma: The Connection Goes Beyond Just Lung Cancer

“Using real-world data, our study is the first to provide evidence of a positive association between asthma and cancer risk in United States patients,” said Yi Guo, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics in the UF College of Medicine and the lead author of the study published March 31 in the journal Cancer Medicine. “Our findings suggest that more research is needed to further examine the mechanisms through which asthma is associated with cancer, given the prevalence of asthma.”

The study, supported by the Cancer Informatics Shared Resource at the UF Health Cancer Center, analyzed the data of more than 90,000 adult patients with asthma from the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network over an eight-year period. By comparing that data to a group of adults without asthma, the researchers found patients with asthma were 1.36 times as likely to develop cancer. When assessing specific cancers, the researchers found patients with asthma had a higher risk for lung cancer, blood cancer, melanoma, kidney cancer, and ovarian cancer.

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Can Steroids Protect from Cancer?

Inhaled steroids were also discovered to have a protective effect by the researchers. When the data was broken down by cancer type, persons with asthma who did not utilize steroids had a higher risk of nine of the 13 malignancies studied.

Only two of the 13 malignancies evaluated were associated with an increased risk of cancer in people with asthma who used steroids: lung cancer and melanoma. Breast, prostate, lung, colorectal, blood, melanoma, endometrial, bladder, kidney, oral cavity and pharynx, pancreatic, ovarian, and cervical cancer were among the 13 malignancies.

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Inflammation: The Culprit Behind Asthma and Cancer

Asthma, a prevalent respiratory condition characterized by chronic inflammation, affects more than 20 million people and 5 million children in the United States. According to research, around a quarter of all cancer cases are caused by chronic infection and inflammation, which is typically caused by an infection or tissue injury that activates an immune system response. Patients can develop chronic inflammation if the first acute response is not well controlled.

Despite the link, most prior studies of U.S. patients have not found an association between asthma and cancers other than lung cancer.

“I was inspired to further examine this clinically relevant link after reading studies that found an association between asthma and cancer risk among patients in Europe and Japan,” said Jonathan D. Licht, M.D., director of the UF Health Cancer Center. “I knew we had a wealth of data at our fingertips through the OneFlorida+ Clinical Network that would provide us with a large enough sample to investigate this question in a meaningful way. The robust database allowed us to accurately identify the study population of United States patients with asthma and assess their medical history and cancer outcomes.”

References:

1. Key facts about Asthma - (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/asthma)
2. Cancer incidence after asthma diagnosis: Evidence from a large clinical research network in the United States - (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36999938/)

Source-Medindia