Air Date: Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Arthritis & cancer
Could arthritis in the knees actually be a pre-cursor to a certain kind of cancer? A new study says what's happening below the waist, could affect your lungs.
Lung cancer is difficult to treat, unless it's caught early, and doctors have a hard time catching it because most patients don't have any symptoms in the beginning. Now a new study is linking arthritis in the knee to lung cancer.
Researchers at a hospital in Italy looked at patients with mild knee arthritis over a period of six years.
The findings: arthritis was the first warning sign of lung cancer.
Cancer expert Dr. Lecia Sequist of Massachusetts General Hospital says this isn't the first time lung cancer and arthritis have been linked.
So what's the connection?
"We don't fully understand exactly what happens between the lung cancer and the joint pain, but there's probably some type of hormone or inflammatory molecule that's released by the cancer that then irritates the bones or the joints in your body and causes it," Dr. Sequist said.
In the study, the number of patients diagnosed with lung cancer was small, just under 2 percent, and they were heavy smokers, which puts them at higher risk of developing lung cancer.
"As far as drawing conclusions from this study, it was provocative, but small and early," Dr. Sequist said. "You have to remember that 99 percent of the patients that had knee pain did not have lung cancer."
But Dr. Sequist said knee pain might be an early warning sign.
"This study brings further awareness to the fact that lung cancer is an important disease, its often diagnosed too late, and we need better and more precise ways to find it early," she said.
Also in the study, researchers say when the lung cancer was removed the knee symptoms disappeared.
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