medwireNews: Individuals receiving treatment for psoriatic arthritis (PsA) may have an increased risk for developing cancer, a meta-analysis indicates.
Pooling data from nine cohort studies comprising 43,115 participants, the study authors found that PsA patients had a significant 1.29-fold increased risk for developing malignancies relative to the general population, but they found evidence of high heterogeneity across studies.
Yunyun Fei and colleagues, from the Chinese Academy of Medical Science & Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, therefore investigated further and found that the use of conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) was significantly associated with an increased cancer risk (pooled relative risk [RR]=1.75), but the use of biologic DMARDs was not.
Moreover, participants appeared to have a significantly increased risk for non-melanoma skin cancers (pooled RR=2.46), but not other malignancies, including breast, gastrointestinal, and thoracic cancers.
“Large-scale longitudinal studies will be essential for drawing firm conclusions regarding PsA-associated risk for malignancy, including the effects of treatment and the identification of disease- and person-specific risk factors,” the team concludes in Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism.
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