Metabolically unhealthy individuals at risk of pancreatic cancer

Poor metabolic health appears to increase susceptibility to pancreatic cancer regardless of body mass index (BMI), a study suggests.

The study used data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service–Health Screening Cohort and included 347,434 Korean adults who had undergone a health examination between 2009 and 2010 and were followed until 2015.

Analysis was stratified according to metabolic health status and BMI, as follows: metabolically healthy normal weight (MHNW), metabolically unhealthy normal weight (MUNW), metabolically healthy obese (MHO), and metabolically unhealthy obese (MUO).

Over a median follow-up of 6.1 years, 886 individuals developed pancreatic cancer. Multivariable Cox analysis revealed that compared with the MHNW phenotype, the MUNW and MUO phenotypes conferred up to a 1.5-fold increase in the risk of incident pancreatic cancer (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 1.52, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 1.27–1.81 and aHR, 1.34, 95 percent CI, 1.12–1.61, respectively).

Meanwhile, there was no risk increase seen for the MHO phenotype.

The risk of pancreatic cancer increased accordingly with the number of metabolically unhealthy components, even after adjusting for BMI (p_trend<0.001).

The present data suggest that the metabolically unhealthy phenotype might represent a potential risk factor for the development of pancreatic cancer independent of obesity.