Photo courtesy of NIH
Compared to patients with other common cancers, patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) have a higher risk of developing a second, unrelated malignancy, according to a new study.
Researchers looked at data on more than 2.1 million patients with 10 of the most common cancers and found that patients with NHL or bladder cancer had the highest risk of developing a second malignancy.
The researchers reported these findings in Cancer.
For this study, Karim Chamie, MD, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues looked at data from Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database.
The team identified patients age 18 and older who were diagnosed with one of the 10 most common cancers—NHL, melanoma, and prostate, breast, lung, colon, rectal, bladder, uterine, and kidney cancers—between 1992 and 2008.
Of the 2,116,163 patients identified, 170,865 (8.1%) developed a second primary malignancy.
In multivariable analysis, patients with NHL or bladder cancer had the highest risk of developing a second malignancy.
The hazard ratios for patients with NHL were 2.70 for men and 2.88 for women. The hazard ratios for bladder cancer were 1.88 for men and 1.66 for women.
Lung cancer was a common second malignancy for both NHL and bladder cancer patients. NHL patients also tended to develop prostate and breast cancer.
Among patients with 2 incident cancers, 13% died of their initial cancer, and 55% died of their second primary malignancy. Lung cancer was the cause of death in 12% of the patients.
“As clinicians, we can become so focused on surveilling our patients to see if a primary cancer recurs that we sometimes may not be aware that patients can be at risk of developing a second, unrelated cancer,” Dr Chamie said.
He and his colleagues believe this study makes a case for monitoring cancer patients for second malignancies.
