Cancer patients may triple the risk of suffering Guillain-Barré syndrome

Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare autoimmune disorder in which a person's own immune system damages the nerves, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis. It can cause symptoms that last from a few weeks to several years. Most people recover completely, but some people have permanent nerve damage.

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO) it affects only one in 100,000 people. The condition kills about one in 20 people who suffer from it. About one in 50,000 Britons and a similar number of Americans develop Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) each year, usually after an infection when the immune system becomes overactive. However, these numbers could be impacted by cancer.

A team of specialists from the Department of Neurology at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark, have just published new research that reveals that cancer patients may have three times more likely to suffer from Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Danish research was conducted on a sample of 6 million patients and found that 2% of those suffering from GBS had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Although only 0.6% of healthy people were diagnosed with cancer during the same period of time.

Specialists examined the association between incident cancer and the subsequent risk of GBS development in a case-control study. These included all patients with GBS first diagnosed in a hospital in Denmark between 1987 and 2016 and 10 population controls matched by age, sex and index date per case; data were included from 2,414 cases with GBS and 23,909 controls over a 30-year period. Each confirmed case was matched with 10 other people of the same age and sex who did not have the disease.

While the study addressed by Danish professionals was observational, its strong database has made it possible to draw triggering conclusions for new research. The professionals indicated in their document that cancer patients are more likely to have had surgery recently, which carries a risk of infection.

Among those who suffered from GBS, 2% had been diagnosed with cancer either within six months of their diagnosis or two months later, according to the study published in the scientific journal Neurology. By way of comparison, only 0.6% of people without Guillain-Barré syndrome had been diagnosed with cancer during the same eight-month period.

The figures show that people with cancer have a three and a half times greater risk of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome than those who do not have it. Even after adjusting the data to account for underlying health problems and other variables, there was still an almost tripled risk.

People with specific cancers seemed to be even more likely to develop the condition. Those who had lymphomas (cancer that begins in the lymph glands that can spread rapidly throughout the body) were seven times more likely to suffer from GBS.

The risk was five and a half times higher among people with lung or prostate cancer and five times higher among those with breast cancer.

Researchers noted that people with cancer or GBS may be more likely to be screened for other conditions, which could skew statistics. But they said their findings still provide solid evidence of their hypothesis.

Specialist Lotte Sahin Levison, lead author of the study and neurologist at the university, said: “While our study suggests that people with cancer have a higher risk of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, it is important that they understand that the overall risk is still very small. We need more research,” he continued. Our results suggest that unidentified factors present in several types of cancer may contribute to this increased risk.”

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