Gallbladder cancer risk in elderly gum disease patients
According to a new report, post-menopausal women suffering from gum disease are at a much higher risk of contracting cancer of the gallbladder.
The study utilised the data of over sixty-five thousand female patients in the USA and has been hailed as the first report of its kind, carried out by researches from the University of Buffalo. The findings, focused solely on women post-menopause, indicated that those with a history of suffering from gum disease correspondingly were at higher risk of certain cancers, in particular those of the gallbladder and oesophagus.
This study is the first that only concentrates on older women as well as the first to link gum disease with cancer, according to its lead author, Jean Wactawski-Wende.
Wactawski-Wende went on to say that the study was easily thorough enough to successfully examine the link between forms of cancer and gum disease, as well as determining the two illnesses’ relationship to each other.
Participants of the study were primarily white and non-Hispanic in origin with an average age of sixty-eight. Researchers’ primary aim was to locate factors affecting the illness rates of post-menopausal women in America. The report included a stage in which participants were asked if they had ever been diagnosed with gum disease.
Female participants with gum disease were found by the report to have a fourteen per cent higher risk of cancer. Whilst the findings of the study indicate that the increased risk was mostly linked to breast cancer, which affected just under 2,500 of the 65,896 participants, there was also prevalence of oesophageal cancer and cancer of the gallbladder. The report is the first ever to link the increased risk of gallbladder cancer to gum disease.
