Washington: A new study has provided compelling evidence of increased lung cancer risk among people with tuberculosis.
Scientists at China Medical University and Hospital in Taiwan randomly selected 1 million patients covered under the country`s National Health Insurance program.
All patients aged 20 years and older with a new diagnosis of tuberculosis between 1998 and 2000 were identified as the exposed cohort and all people without tuberculosis history were the non-exposed cohort.
Patients with any cancer diagnosis were excluded to ensure that all participants were cancer-free at the start of both cohorts.
Overall, 716,872 adults were eligible for the analysis - 4,480 in the tuberculosis cohort and 712,392 in the non-tuberculosis cohort.
Both groups were followed from 2001 through 2007. Results showed that patients with tuberculosis were 10.9 times more likely than non-tuberculosis patients to develop lung cancer.
Mortality was also much higher in the patients with tuberculosis than in the non-tuberculosis patients.
The study was published in the January issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.
ANI