Drug use and cancer

Medicines can affect cancer risk, for example, hormone preparations can affect the risk breast and ovarian cancer. The purpose of the project is to study associations between drug use and the risk of developing different types of cancer, as well as prognosis after cancer diagnosis.

Mapping of drugs and cancer risk

This large-scale, registry-based project will investigate whether there are associations between medicine use and cancer incidence/survival. This is done without underlying hypotheses and aims to discover correlations that are not yet known. Therefore, a «screening» method is used, where a possible association is investigated for all possible combinations of drugs and cancer types. The project is also developing a statistical tool for monitoring prescription drugs with regard to cancer risk and survival in the future

Cancer risk and survival from drug use

Hormone-based drugs have been an important part of the project so far. Among other things, associations with the risk of breast cancer, melanoma and colorectal cancer have been studied in an older version of the registry link. We plan to repeat these studies in the updated link, in addition to other cancers such as ovarian cancer.