New Evidence Showing Patients with TB Have an Increased Risk of Lung Cancer

Yu, et al, in China conducted a population-based cohort study to better understand the relationship between tuberculosis (TB) and lung cancer. Analysis of patient care data from the National Health Insurance (NHI) program showed that the incidence of lung cancer was 11-fold higher in the tuberculosis cohort than in the non-tuberculosis cohort. Also, results showed that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and smoking enhanced the risk of developing lung cancer in TB patients. The longitudinal cohort study identified subjects aged 20 years or older out of a randomly selected sample of one million subjects in the NHI system and placed them in one of two cohorts–subjects with newly diagnosed TB and subjects without tuberculosis– and followed their records for 7 to 9 years. The results were based off of a final participant pool of 4480 persons in the TB cohort and 712, 392 persons in the non-TB cohort. The article appeared in the January issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

In other news:

Researchers Explore Factors Associated with Mortality in TB Patients

A group of researchers retrospectively reviewed records of patients with drug-susceptible tuberculosis reported to the San Francisco Tuberculosis Control program over a 11 year period. The factors associated with higher risk of mortality include advanced age, HIV/AIDS co-infection, and advanced TB disease. Additionally, interruption of anti-TB therapy mainly due to non-adherence was found to have an independent association to risk of increased death in TB patients. The study highlights the need for shorter regimens and improved treatments for TB. The open access article can be found here.