Related Experiment Videos
Cancer preceding Wegener's granulomatosis: a case-control study
Mikkel Faurschou1, Lene Mellemkjaer, Inge J Sorensen
1Department of Rheumatology, The National University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark. baslund@rh.regionh.dk.
Objective:
To investigate whether patients with WG have an increased risk of malignancies prior to and/or around the time of the vasculitis diagnosis, as suggested by previous studies.
Methods:
A total of 293 WG patients were included in the study. Ten gender- and age-matched controls were selected randomly for each patient from the Danish Central Population Register. Information on malignancies was obtained through the Danish Cancer Registry. Occurrence of malignancies before WG diagnosis among patients and before WG diagnosis of their matched case among controls (reference date) was compared by calculation of prevalence odds ratios (OR).
Results:
Twenty-six patients were diagnosed with cancer before WG, while 194 controls were diagnosed with cancer before the reference date (OR 1.4; 95% CI 0.9, 2.2). Among specific malignancies, a significantly increased prevalence was found for testis cancer (OR 6.4; 95% CI 1.1, 38) based on two patients, who developed testis cancer >10 years before WG. The overall prevalence of malignancies diagnosed <2 years before WG was not significantly increased (OR: 1.6; 95% CI: 0.8, 3.4), but non-melanoma skin cancer occurred with an increased prevalence within this time interval (OR 4.0; 95% CI 1.4, 12).
Conclusions:
We did not find clear evidence of an increased prevalence of preceding cancer in our WG cohort, indicating that shared risk factors are of minor importance for the excess of malignancies that occur in WG patients after the vasculitis diagnosis. Furthermore, our current and previously reported latency analyses do not substantiate that serious malignancies play a significant role in the pathogenic events that trigger development of WG.
Related Concept Videos
Cancer Prevention
Some...
Mouse Models of Cancer Study
The development of transgenic, knockout, and knock-in mice has led to an exponential increase in their use as model organisms in research,...
Mouse Models of Cancer Study
The development of transgenic, knockout, and knock-in mice has led to an exponential increase in their use as model organisms in research,...
Cancer-Critical Genes I: Proto-oncogenes
When the function of certain critical genes, especially those involved in cell cycle regulation and cell growth signaling cascades, gets disrupted, it upsets the cell cycle progression. Such cells with unchecked cell cycles start proliferating uncontrollably and eventually develop into tumors.
Such genes that act...
Cancers Originate from Somatic Mutations in a Single Cell
Cancers Originate from Somatic Mutations in a Single Cell