TAKING a popular type of painkiller for more than 10 years brings a three-times higher chance of getting kidney cancer, scientists said yesterday.
A study of more than 125,000 adults found people who took non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs – which include ibuprofen, diclofenac, and naproxen – were overall 51 per cent more likely to develop the disease.
But those who took them for more than a decade almost tripled their risk of suffering renal cell cancer, the most common form of kidney cancer, American researchers found.
Aspirin was the only one of the group of medications, used long-term to treat inflammatory conditions such as arthritis, found not to increase the risk.
The research, published in this month’s edition of Archives of Internal Medicine, was carried out by Dr Eunyoung Cho and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
Dr Cho said: “In these large studies of women and men, we found that use of non-aspirin NSAIDs was associated with an elevated risk of renal cell cancer, especially among those who took them for a long duration.”
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It is the second time this month that NSAIDs have been associated with health risks.
A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found they increased the risk of miscarriage in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.
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