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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 9|pp 12641—12659

Deaths from COPD in patients with cancer: a population-based study

Yongqiang Zheng1,2, Yan Huang3, Xiwen Zheng4, Jiangtong Peng1, Ying Chen5, Kaixu Yu6, Yun Yang1, Xi Wang1, Xue Yang1, Jiaxin Qian1, Xindi Wang1, Xiaolan Gao1, Bian Wu1
  • 1Cancer Center, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China
  • 2State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510060, China
  • 3Department of Emergency Surgery, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China
  • 4Department of Clinical Medicine, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou 350000, China
  • 5Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China
  • 6Department of Orthopedics, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China
* Co-first authors
Received: October 3, 2020Accepted: March 31, 2021Published: April 27, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202939

Copyright: © 2021 Zheng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Features of the deaths caused by COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) in cancer patients remained a controversial issue. This study aimed to characterize the demographic characteristics and mortality rates of the deaths from COPD in patients with cancer. In total, 7,846,370 cancer patients aged 40 years or older in the United States were identified from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database (1975–2016). Mortality rates and SMRs (standardized mortality ratios) adjusted by age, race, sex, and calendar year were calculated to investigate the risk of COPD deaths in cancer survivors and to compare it with the general population. A total of 119,228 COPD deaths in patients with cancer were recorded, with a mortality rate of 261.5/100,000 person-years, nearly two-fold that of the general population (SMR, 2.17; 95% CI [confidence interval], 2.16–2.18). The proportion of cancer survivors dying from COPD increased from 0.9% in 1975 to 3.4% in 2016. Patients with lung cancer had a higher overall risk (SMR, 9.23; 95% CI, 9.12–9.35) than those with extrapulmonary malignancies. Among all extrapulmonary sites, laryngeal (SMR, 5.54; 95% CI, 5.34–5.75) and esophageal cancers (SMR, 4.33; 95% CI, 4.04–4.63) had the highest SMR. The risk of death from COPD increased with follow-up time.