FRIDAY, Nov. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Although long-term pharmacologic gastric acid suppression is linked to increased rates of esophageal and gastric adenocarcinoma, the association is likely due to the underlying treatment indication as an independent risk factor, not the drugs themselves, according to research published in the November issue of Gut.
Luis A. Garcia Rodriguez, M.D., of the Centro Espanol de Investigacion Farmacoepidemiologica in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues evaluated the long-term association of gastric acid-suppressing drugs and the incidence of esophageal and gastric cancers using a population-based case-control study nested in the U.K.'s general practitioners research database.
The researchers identified 287 patients with esophageal adenocarcinoma, 195 with gastric cardia adenocarcinoma and 327 with gastric non-cardia adenocarcinoma, along with 10,000 randomly selected controls. Esophageal indications for gastric acid suppression (reflux, esophagitis or hiatal hernia) had a more than fivefold higher risk for esophageal cancer in long-term medication users. Those long-term users with peptic ulcer indications had more than four times the incidence of gastric non-cardia cancer.
"The increased risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma and gastric non-cardia adenocarcinoma among persons on long-term gastric acid-suppressive drugs were highly driven by the indications of acid-suppressing treatment. Thus, the observed associations could be entirely due to the underlying indication being an independent risk factor of the specified cancer," the authors conclude.
The study was supported by AstraZeneca R&D, Sweden.
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