According to a report released in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the drugs used to prevent rejection of the new kidney by suppressing the body's immune system may cause an increased risk for nonmelanoma skin cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and the rare skin malignancy known as Kaposi's sarcoma.
Lead author Claire M. Vajdic, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney writes, "We found that the incidence of cancer in many organs was markedly increased after kidney transplantation."
"After kidney transplantation, a wide variety of cancers across a number of organ systems occur with substantially increased incidence. Most, but not all, of these cancers are those with known or suspected viral causes. In contrast, cancer incidence was only slightly increased before kidney transplantation." Vajdic added.
The researchers also point to an important role of the interaction between common viral infections and the immune system in the origin of cancers at a broad range of sites.
The study compared the incidence of cancer in nearly 29,000 patients with end-stage kidney disease who received kidney transplants and collected data from the five years before the transplant, during dialysis and after transplantation.
The group found that, after transplant, the overall incidence of cancer rose 3.27 times (this statistic excluded nonmelanoma skin cancer and cancers known to frequently cause end-stage kidney disease).
Dr. Amy Friedman, an associate professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, "This is a fascinating paper. It, for the first time, gives us a statistical demonstration of what we see clinically but could not prove.
