People with asthma are 36% more likely to develop cancer than people without the respiratory disease, according to a study published in Cancer Medicine, marking the first time a positive association between asthma and cancer risk has been discovered in the United States.

Study details

According to the  Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, almost 26 million Americans have asthma, including nearly 5 million children and adolescents under 18.

For the study, researchers tracked 360,084 patients ages 18 to 65, 90,021 of whom had asthma for eight years. The patients were tracked through the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network, an initiative of the  University of Florida (UF) Clinical and Translational Science Institute, which integrates research from UF Health and the  UF Cancer Center and the health system's partners throughout Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.

The researchers found that people with asthma were 36% more likely to develop cancer than those without asthma. Specifically, people with asthma were more at risk of developing lung cancer, blood cancer, melanoma, kidney cancer, and ovarian cancer.

The researchers also found that patients with asthma who did not use steroids had a higher risk of developing nine of the 13 cancers studied than those without asthma. Asthma patients who did use inhaled steroids were only at an elevated risk of developing lung cancer and melanoma than those without the disease, suggesting the steroids had a protective effect.

Discussion

According to Yi Guo, an associate professor in the department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics at the  UF College of Medicine and lead author of the study, the study is "the first to provide evidence of a positive association between asthma and cancer risk in United States patients."

Guo added that the study's findings "suggest that more research is needed to further examine the mechanisms through which asthma is associated with cancer, given the prevalence of asthma."

Jonathan Licht, director of the UF Health Cancer Center, said he was "inspired to further examine this clinically relevant link after reading studies that found an association between asthma and cancer risk among patients in Europe and Japan."

"I knew we had a wealth of data at our fingertips through the OneFlorida+ Clinical Network that would provide us with a large enough sample to investigate this question in a meaningful way," Licht said. "The robust database allowed us to accurately identify the study population of United States patients with asthma and assess their medical history and cancer outcomes."

Jiang Bian, chief data scientist at UF Health, a professor in the department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics, and director of the  Cancer Informatics Shared Resource at the UF Health Cancer Center, said the study shows how important large collections of data like OneFlorida+ can be.

"The increasing availability of large collections of real-world data such as linked electronic health records and claims from large clinical data networks like OneFlorida+ offers opportunities to generate evidence that reflects the patients being treated and cared for in actual clinical settings," Bian said. "Data-oriented research in biomedical research has been rapidly evolving because of the advancements in artificial intelligence combined with these real-world data. The success of studies like this one reenforces the importance of a solid data infrastructure like OneFlorida+." (Buletti, UF Health News, 4/11; Searing, Washington Post, 5/1; Mueller, The Hill, 5/1)