Association between traumatic brain injury and the subsequent risk of brain cancer

This population-based study in Taiwan aimed to investigate the risk of having a diagnosis of malignant brain tumors within 3 years after a traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study used data from the Traumatic Brain Injury Registry and the National Health Insurance Research Database. The study cohort comprised 5007 patients who had visited ambulatory care centers or had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of TBI between 2001 and 2002. The comparison cohort was 25,035 randomly selected enrollees. Each patient's brain cancer status was individually tracked for a 3-year period following their index date. Stratified Cox proportional hazards regressions were performed for analyses. During the 3 years of follow-up, nine patients in each cohort, both the TBI and the non-TBI cohort, were diagnosed with brain cancer. As compared to those patients without TBI, patients with TBI were more likely to receive a diagnosis of malignant brain tumors within the 3-year period following their index date: the incidence rate of malignant brain tumors was 6.28 (95% CI: 3.06-11.53) per 10,000 person-years in patients with TBI and 1.25 (95% CI: 0.61-2.29) per 10,000 person-years in patients without TBI. After adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, the hazard of being diagnosed with malignant brain tumors during the 3-year follow-up period was 4.67 (95% CI: 1.84-11.83) times greater for those who sustained a TBI than for patients in the comparison cohort. In addition, we found an association between TBI severity and malignant brain tumor among patients with TBI (p=0.033). Our findings suggest a positive correlation between TBI and the relatively short-term development of malignant neoplasms of the brain.