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| | | ![]() Hepatitis C May Increase Pancreatic Cancer Risk HOBOKEN, NJ -- January 14, 2009 -- Hepatitis C virus (HCV) increases a person's risk for a highly fatal cancer of the biliary tree, according to a study published in the January issue of Hepatology. To better understand the associations between HCV and these cancers, Hashem El-Serag, MD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study of more than 718,000 US veterans who were treated at Veterans Affairs medical facilities between October 1, 1988, and September 30, 2004. Among them, 146,394 had HCV and 572,293 did not. Uninfected subjects were matched to infected ones by sex, age, and type and date of visit. The researchers followed the subjects for an average of 2.3 years to determine the incidence of these cancers. They found that "risk for biliary-tree cancer in the HCV-infected cohort, although low (4 per 100,000 person-years), was more than double that in the HCV-uninfected cohort." The study is the first to formally examine the association between HCV and pancreatic cancer. It is also the first time a significant association has been detected between HCV and this type of cancer in a large cohort study. The findings may lead to greater examination of rare malignancies. SOURCE: Wiley-Blackwell
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