Stroke Linked to Increased Cancer Risk

Not only does your doctor have to have protocols for rehab and dementia prevention they will have to add cancer prevention. Good luck with that, since we seem to have nothing for the first two I expect nothing from this latest one. Cause vs. correlation? Age related? I say there was not enough analysis to determine causation.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/839931
Previous research has shown a link between cancer and subsequent stroke, but a new study found the reverse relationship — that patients who have had a stroke are at higher risk for cancer.
The study suggests that the incidence of cancer is 1.4 times higher among stroke survivors at 2 years than the general population, and that having cancer increases the risk for death by 3-fold in stroke survivors.
These results "hopefully help us to understand better that cancer and stroke are not mutually exclusive disease entities," as has previously been thought, lead author Adnan Qureshi, MD, professor of neurology, neurosurgery and radiology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, told a press conference here.
"There is clearly a higher risk of cancer in patients with ischemic stroke as compared with the general population, and that higher risk of incident cancer explains in part why these patients have a higher chance of dying over the next few years compared to their counterparts who haven't developed a stroke," he added.
Further research is needed to explain this association, he said, and to determine whether there is a role for more active cancer screening in patients with ischemic stroke.
The research was presented during the International Stroke Conference (ISC) 2015.
Incident Cancer
For this analysis, the researchers looked at participants in the Vitamin Intervention for Stroke Prevention (VISP) study, a randomized, double-blind, multicenter clinical trial that included patients aged 35 years and older who had sustained a nondisabling stroke within the previous 120 days and had elevated levels of homocysteine. Their mean age was 66 years.
Over a 2-year period, 133 incident cancers occurred among the 3247 participants. The most common type was skin cancer (35.3%). Prostate cancer made up 18.0% of cancers (most participants — 2013 — were men).
At 1 year, the age-adjusted annual rate of cancer in patients with ischemic stroke was higher than in the general population and that this annual rate continued to be higher in these patients over 2 years (1301.7 per 100,000 persons vs 911.5 per 100,000; standardized incidence ratio [SIR], 1.4; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.2 - 1.6).
After adjustment for potential confounders, there was a higher risk for death, fatal/disabling stroke or death, and the composite endpoint of stroke, coronary heart disease, and/or death among participants who developed incident cancer compared with those who were cancer free.
"Essentially, if you develop incident cancer you have a 3-fold higher likelihood of dying during the follow-up period," Dr Qureshi noted. "So there is also a mechanistic explanation with incident cancer, and the higher mortality that is experienced by these patients."