Kids with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) appear to be at three times greater risk than kids without JIA of developing cancer—whether they were treated with biologics or not.
This is the conclusion of researchers out of United BioSource Corporation and published in the journal Arthritis Care & Research.
Researchers found that the incidence of cancer among kids with JIA given conventional therapy was 67 cases per 100,000 person-years compared to the incidence among kids without JIA, which was 23.2 cases per 100,000 person-years.
Kids not treated with biologic agents (such as TNF blockers, notoriously associated with JIA and cancer incidence) were found to have a 2.81 times higher risk for cancer.
The risk seems to be related to age: according to the research, patients between the ages of 12 and 17 were actually found to be at a lowered risk of cancer compared to patients aged 18 and over.
This study was a case-control study involving 3,605 patients with a mean age of 12 who had been diagnosed with JIA prior to turning 16 against over 37,000 controls from an administrative database.
Source: MedPage Today
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