Increased Cancer Risk in Heart Failure Patients

Heart failure affects around 65 million people worldwide. Some cancer patients develop heart failure as a consequence of treatment. Recently small studies have discovered that elevated incidence of cancer is seen in heart failure patients during the course of their heart disease.

The research study conducted in more than 200,000 individuals, presented at Heart Failure 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and published in the journal ESC Heart Failure revealed that heart failure patients are more likely to develop cancer compared to their peers without heart failure.

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‘Heart failure patients can benefit from intensive monitoring for cancer development through screening.’

"This was an observational study and the results do not prove that heart failure causes cancer," said author Dr. Mark Luedde of the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and Cardiology Joint Practice Bremerhaven, Germany.

This study investigated the association between heart failure and new cancer development in a large cohort using information from the nationally representative Disease Analyser database, which covers 1,274 general practices in Germany.

Both heart failure patients and those without heart failure and cancer, at the beginning of the study were individually matched by sex, age, obesity, diabetes, and consultation frequency. Statistical models were used to examine the association between heart failure and the incidence of cancer over 10 years.

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During the 10-year observation period, the incidence of cancer was significantly higher among heart failure patients (25.7%) compared to those without heart failure (16.2%).

The incidence of cancer among women were 28.6% in patients with heart failure and 18.8% in those without heart failure. In men the corresponding rates were 23.2% and 13.8%.

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The greatest increase in risk is observed for cancer of the lip, oral cavity, and pharynx, with a hazard ratio of 2.10, followed by respiratory organ cancer, with a hazard ratio of 1.91.

This causal relationship between heart failure and an increased rate of cancer may be due to factors secreted by the failing heart to stimulate tumour growth as shown in experimental evidence.

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While heart failure and cancer share common risk factors such as obesity and diabetes, our database does not include information on smoking, alcohol consumption or physical activity, so we were unable to match for these in the analysis.

Source-Medindia