MedWire News: Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) face an increased risk for death from lung cancer and other non-pulmonary malignancies, say researchers who also found that statin therapy may reduce cancer-related mortality among such patients.
Writing in the journal Thorax, D Poldermans (Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and team explain: “COPD is associated with an increased risk for lung cancer, independently of smoking. However, the relationship between COPD and total cancer mortality is less certain.”
The researchers therefore investigated the association between COPD and total cancer mortality, and whether the use of statins, which have been associated with both a reduced and increased risk for cancer in previous studies, modifies this relationship.
They studied data on 3371 patients, aged an average of 66 years, with peripheral arterial disease who underwent vascular surgery between 1990 and 2006. Of these, 1310 (39%) had previously been diagnosed with COPD.
Over a median follow-up of 5 years, 316 (9%) patients died from cancer, including 102 (3%) who died from lung cancer.
Analysis revealed that patients with COPD were 2.06 times more likely to die of lung cancer and 1.43 times more likely to die of extrapulmonary cancer than those without the respiratory condition, with the excess risk mainly occurring among patients with moderate or severe COPD.
Among patients with COPD, those who used statins at baseline (n=330) had a 43% reduced risk for total cancer mortality during follow-up compared with those who did not, although this finding was of borderline significance. There was no significant relationship between statin therapy and lung cancer mortality among COPD patients.
Poldermans and team conclude: “COPD was associated with increased lung and extrapulmonary cancer mortality in this large cohort of patients with peripheral arterial disease undergoing vascular surgery.”
They add: “Statins may modulate the risk for extrapulmonary cancer mortality in patients with COPD.”
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