Pain as a Protective Factor for Alzheimer Disease in Patients with Cancer

Alzheimer disease (AD) and cancer have been reported to be inversely correlated in incidence, but the mechanism remains elusive.

A case-control study was conducted, based on the SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) Research Plus data, to evaluate 12 factors in patients with cancer.

Severe pain was related to reduced AD risk, while older age at cancer diagnosis, female, longer survival years after tumor diagnosis, more benign/borderline tumors, less cancer-directed surgery, and more chemotherapy were associated with higher AD risk. In addition, patients of different races or with different cancer sites were associated with different risks of getting AD. Cases had a higher prevalence of severe pain than controls in all race and cancer site subgroups, except for in digestive cancer, where the result was the opposite.

This study indicated pain as a novel protective factor for AD in patients with cancer. The mechanism behind it may provide new perspective on AD pathogenesis and AD-cancer association, which we discussed in our own hypothesis of the mechanism of pain action. In addition, digestive cancer pain had an opposite impact on AD risk from other cancer pains, which suggests the uniqueness of digestive system in interacting with the central nervous system.