Health-Related Complications of Acromegaly —Risk of Malignant Neoplasms

Conclusions On the basis of the described studies the risk of malignant neoplasms seems to be increased in patients with acromegaly. The strongest evidence is available for thyroid and colon cancer. Higher incidence of these two cancers was confirmed by numerous studies and at least two meta-analyses performed by different authors. Relatively strong evidence is available for breast cancer, increased risk was described by few studies and confirmed by meta-analysis performed by Dal et al. (15). Risk of neuroendocrine neoplasms seems to be increased in patients with MEN1 syndrome (6, 18). The increased prevalence of other malignant neoplasms was reported in single or few studies and remains controversial. The controversies on the issue and divergent results of particular studies have numerous causes. First of them is rarity of the disease (28, 29). Secondly—as it was underlined in the meta-analysis published by Wolinski et al. (21)—however one could have impression of abundance of available studies, most of them do not allow for reliable assessment of the cancer risk in acromegalic patients. Authors of the mentioned meta-analysis identified 22 studies assessing the prevalence of thyroid cancer. Half of them did not include control group (8, 26, 30–38), two included control groups not matched by sex and age (39, 40), one assessed only the occurrence of palpable goiter (41). All in all, only five case-controls studies (9, 17, 42–44) and three stud...
Source: Frontiers in Endocrinology - Category: Endocrinology Source Type: research