Transplants attributed to higher rate of cancer deaths.
Research has revealed that transplant patients have an increased risk of dying from all cancers and the risk is heightened in younger patients. The dismal news was published this week in the online edition of JAMA Oncology.
According to usnews.com, the research, lead by Dr. Nancy Baxter, chief of general surgery at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, showed heart disease was the leading cause of death, with cancer coming in at the number two spot. More than 11,000 patients receving heart, lung, liver, and kidney transplants were observed during the study, which included information from the years 1991 to 2010.
Although doctors have known that transplant patients are more likely to get cancer, it had been unknown how many were likely to die from the disease. According to Dr. Baxter, “We haven’t known the impact that cancer has on them, because they have a lot of other things going on as well that can affect their health.”
Baxter, who is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, said their findings show death among transplant patients is 30 times more likely from non-melanoma skin cancers.
“In addition, people who’ve had a transplant are almost 13 times more likely to die from liver cancer, and nearly 10 times more likely to die from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The risk of dying from bone or soft tissue cancer was about five times higher,”according to the findings.
Pediatric patients faced a cancer death risk, “85 times higher than their peers.” Although transplant patients over the age of 60 had the “lowest risk of cancer death,” research uncovered the rate is still twice as much for their peer rate of death.
It is believed that the immune suppressing drugs transplant patients receive to prevent organ rejection, “may work against them when it comes to cancer, allowing cancers to grow, Baxter said.
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