Introduction
Recurrent or persistent inflammation, featuring Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF), may induce, promote, or influence susceptibility to carcinogenesis. However, the association between FMF and malignancy was rarely described before.
Objectives
To assess the prevalence of malignancy in FMF.
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Methods
Demographic data of FMF patients, followed in the national FMF center at Sheba medical center (n=8352) and Hadassah Medical Center (n=1083) were obtained from FMF patient hospital registries. The prevalence of cancer in the general population, and in the study registries was attained from the cancer registry of Israel and analyzed according to age, origin, and cancer type. The Standardized incidence rates (SIR) of the different cancers in FMF patients were calculated and compared to the cancer SIR of the parallel Israeli ethnic population.
Results
Of 9435 FMF patients (4696 men, 4739 female), 363 developed cancer during the years 1970- 2011. FMF female patients developed significantly more lymphoma (Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin) and in-situ cervical cancer than the matched general population, SIR 2.07 (95% CI 1.12-2.99) and 1.86 (95% CI 1.20-2.51), respectively. In contrast, male and female with FMF had a lower gastrointestinal cancer incidence, SIR 0.68 (95% CI 0.42-0.95) and 0.63 (95% CI 0.36-0.90).
Conclusion
The risk for lymphoma and in-situ cervical cancer is increased about twice in FMF. Understanding the underlying mechanism (inflammation? Colchicine? Genetic predisposition?) may improve patient prognosis.
Disclosure of interest
None declared.
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Open Access
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.