Eczema patients have lowered risk of lung cancer
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People who’ve had eczema at some time in their lives appear to be less likely than others to develop lung cancer, according to European researchers.
As senior investigator Dr. Paolo Boffetta commented to Reuters Health, a “self-reported history of eczema appears to reduce the risk of lung cancer. These findings might shed light on mechanisms of lung carcinogenesis in humans.”
Boffetta, at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and colleagues write in the American Journal of Epidemiology that “persons with a history of eczema have been shown to have a reduced risk of lung cancer, but the evidence has been inconclusive because of the small size of previous studies and their limited ability to control for confounding by smoking,”
To investigate further, the researchers examined data on 2854 people with lung cancer and 3116 matched “controls” recruited between 1998 and 2001 from 16 areas in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom.
A total of 156 of the lung cancer cases (5 percent) and 275 controls (9 percent) reported a history of eczema. After factoring in age, sex, and cumulative tobacco smoking, a history of eczema reduced the chances of developing lung cancer by 39 percent.
Overall, the researchers conclude that the observed risk reduction “was relatively large and might be of significant clinical importance.”
SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, September 2005.
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