PLoS ONE: Opioid use may be directly related to an increased risk of pancreatic cancer in individuals

In fact, opioid abuse and overdose have now progressed into a public health crisis facing humanity, with about 70,000 drug overdose deaths reported in 2017, 68 percent of which were related to opioid use;
It's good to expect that there has also been an increase in addiction to opioids in patients who use opioids to treat chronic pain, with 29 percent of them abusing opioids and 12 percent developing opioid use disorders.
In recent years, the incidence of pancreatic cancer in the U.S. population has also increased, opioids have been shown to have harmful effects on many types of cancer, and recent research has shown that use may be a risk factor for pancreatic cancer in people in western Central Asia;
, M.D., said: 'We aim to analyze the relevant between the likelihood of changes in opioid use patterns in populations between 1999 and 2016 and changes in the incidence of pancreatic cancer; The researchers extracted opioid mortality as a substitute for prescription and illicit opioid use, while the incidence of pancreatic cancer was extracted from the CDC's online database, and the researchers also extracted lifestyle and behavioral factors that over time may affect the risk of pancreatic cancer in the population.
Using data sets across the country, the researchers assessed whether trends in opioid use could explain the increase in the rate of diagnosis of pancreatic cancer over time at national and state levels in the United States; The incidence of pancreatic cancer in the population and the mortality rate from opioid use both increased, after a state's opioid mortality rate may be able to significantly predict the incidence of pancreatic cancer in the population over the years, but also will have a significant impact on the annual change in the incidence of pancreatic cancer.
Researchers have gathered evidence that there is a link between opioid consumption and the occurrence of pancreatic cancer, and the next step will be to directly determine the role of opioids as a new risk factor for pancreatic cancer, while the researchers will conduct large-scale research based on anger groups or reliably document the Longitudinal studies of long-term health outcomes for drug users of opioids; the current results suggest that once confirmed by individual level data on opioid intake and pancreatic cancer risk, non-anaesthetic pain control therapy may be considered in these patients, resulting in a direct clinical correlation.
researchers also recommend investigating the mechanisms of possibility of linked opioid use to the occurrence and progression of pancreatic cancer, in line with current research, that a recent randomized controlled trial of patients with advanced cancer, including pancreatic cancer, showed that patients who regularly used opioid antagonists had improved overall survival compared to placebos, and that relevant mechanism studies may also help researchers better understand why opioids potentially affect cancer progression.
researchers say the study could also help scientists further clarify at a later stage what paths opioids use to influence cancer progress.
original source: Usman Barlass, Ameya Deshmukh, Todd Beck, et al. Opioid use as a potential risk factor for pancreatic cancer in the United States: An analysis of state and national level databases, PLOS ONE (2021). DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0244285