Chronic Kidney Disease Raises Risk for Some Cancers

May 2 -- FRIDAY, May 1 (HealthDay News) -- Older men who suffer from moderate chronic kidney disease appear to have a higher risk for developing certain kinds of cancers, a team of Australian scientists report.

The observation -- which suggests a bump in the risk for lung and/or urinary cancer, but not prostate cancer -- adds to previous evidence that patients with end-stage renal disease and those undergoing kidney transplantation are at an increased risk for developing a malignancy.

Results of the research effort, led by Dr. Germaine Wong from the Center for Transplant and Renal Research at Children's Hospital in Westmead, Australia, are being published in the April 30 online issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology.

According to the National Kidney Foundation, 26 million Americans currently suffer from chronic kidney disease, and seniors -- along with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders -- face a particularly high risk for developing the illness.

In the new study, Wong and her colleagues analyzed a decade's worth of data on more than 3,600 Australian men who were between the ages of 49 and 97 and predominantly white.

Noting that nearly 20 percent of the men went on to develop cancer during the study period, the research team found that moderate kidney dysfunction was, in fact, associated with a 39 percent increased risk for certain cancers.

They further noted that men with "significant" kidney disease faced three times the risk for developing cancer, as compared with those men who retained normal kidney function.

While highlighting the need for more research, the Australian team theorize that kidney disease and cancer could be linked via the systemic inflammation that results from chronic kidney disease.

Dr. Matthew Weir, director of the division of nephrology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, described the findings as "important new information."

"We've known for many years that people with end-stage kidney disease have an increased risk for malignancy in general, and renal cancer in particular," he noted. "And this study provides a logical extension of this previous observation, in that we now see that there is a graded relationship of risk for cancer, and that once again renal disease is the top of the list."