MedWire News: Study findings confirm that celiac disease patients have a similar risk for colorectal cancer (CRC) to the general population.
Celiac disease has been linked to increased risk for lymphoma and small bowel adenocarcinoma in previous studies, but not CRC.
Peter Green (Columbia University, New York, USA) and team attempted to determine if celiac patients truly have no increased risk for CRC, or if they have increased risk that is masked by a higher degree of health-care usage and experience of screening endoscopy than the general population.
The researchers enrolled 180 celiac disease patients and 346 non-celiac controls, all of whom underwent colonoscopy during a 44-month period at the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University. The cases and controls were matched by age, gender, and endoscopist.
They found that 13% of celiac disease patients and 17% of controls had at least one CRC adenoma present, a non-significant between-group difference.
In both celiac patients and controls, older age and male gender were significantly associated with increased adenoma risk. More specifically, relative risk increased by 4% with each additional year of age, and men had a 2.33-fold increased risk compared with women.
"The lack of increased risk of CRC observed in population studies is related to a true average risk of colorectal neoplasia, rather than artifactually reflecting increased colonoscopy and associated polypectomies in the celiac population," write the authors.
"Future studies are warranted to evaluate a possible mild protective effect of celiac disease on the development of colorectal adenomas, and to characterize better the mechanisms by which celiac disease affects the individual patient's risk of malignancy," they conclude.
The results of this study are published in the journal Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
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