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Is a cancer diagnosis associated with subsequent risk of transient global amnesia?
Jianwei Zhu1, Donghao Lu2, Olafur Sveinsson3
1Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Department of Orthopedics, Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, Jinan, China.
Background:
Psychological stress has been associated with transient global amnesia (TGA). Whether a cancer diagnosis, a severely stressful life event, is associated with subsequent risk of TGA has not been studied.
Methods:
Based on the Swedish Cancer Register and Patient Register, we conducted a prospective cohort study including 5,365,608 Swedes at age 30 and above during 2001-2009 to examine the relative risk of TGA among cancer patients, as compared to cancer-free individuals. Incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) derived from Poisson regression were used as estimates of the association between cancer diagnosis and the risk of TGA.
Results:
During the study 322,558 individuals (6.01%) received a first diagnosis of cancer. We identified 210 cases of TGA among the cancer patients (incidence rate, 0.22 per 1000 person-years) and 4,887 TGA cases among the cancer-free individuals (incidence rate, 0.12 per 1000 person-years). Overall, after adjustment for age, sex, calendar year, socioeconomic status, education and civil status, cancer patients had no increased risk of TGA than the cancer-free individuals (IRR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.86-1.13). The IRRs did not differ over time since cancer diagnosis or across individual cancer types. The null association was neither modified by sex, calendar period or age.
Conclusion:
Our study did not provide support for the hypothesis that patients with a new diagnosis of cancer display a higher risk of TGA than cancer-free individuals.
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