Heart Failure Correlates with Increased Cancer Risk

Age-related disease results from the underlying cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Different people accumulate that damage at modestly different rates, the result of lifestyle choices and exposure to infectious disease. Thus the presence of a sufficient burden of damage to produce one age-related disease will be accompanied by a raised risk of other age-related conditions. The conditions themselves need not have any direct relationship with one another, but can be distinct outcomes of the same root causes. Here, however, researchers propose that heart failure may provoke increased cancer risk via inflammatory and other signaling pathways. This may or may not be the case. The inflammatory signaling certainly exists, but it is always a challenge to determine the relative significance of the many possible contributing mechanism in the onset and progression of age-related disease. Our study demonstrates that heart failure patients have a significantly increased incidence of cancer in general and of each individual cancer type studied. The data - based on a collective of over 100,000 heart failure patients - confirm the results of previous evaluations in smaller study populations. The data do not prove a causal relationship but instead show a statistical relationship between heart failure and cancer. Nevertheless, these results allow us to speculate that there may be a causal relationship between heart failure and an increased cancer rate. The particularly h...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs