Prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among 48,061 digestive tract cancer patients in Europe.

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) shares common risk factors with digestive tract malignancies such as esophageal cancer. However, the prevalence and geographic distribution of COPD in patients with gastrointestinal (GI) cancer is only poorly understood.

Methods: We used the IQVIA's Oncology Dynamics (OD) database to identify a total of 48,061 patients with GI cancer (4,229 esophagus, 7,568 stomach, 27,300 colon, and 8,964 rectum cancer) from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Results: The prevalence of COPD among the 48,061 patients with GI cancer was 12.5% (5,983/48,061). We observed significant differences in frequencies of COPD between the different cancer sites with the highest COPD prevalence among patients with esophageal (25.5%) or gastric cancer (13.4%) and lowest prevalence in colon (11.0%) or rectal (9.8%) cancer patients. Moreover, rates of COPD strongly varied between digestive tract cancer patients from different countries. Interestingly, Spain (16.8%) and Germany (13.4%) had the highest COPD prevalence while prevalence of COPD was lowest in the UK (8.4%). Finally, we showed that the proportion of digestive tract cancer patients with COPD was highest among male patients (15%) and those >80 years (20.6%) when compared to all other patients.

Conclusions: In this analysis, we show that COPD is found at high frequencies in patients with digestive tract cancer in Europe. We demonstrate that prevalence varies according to digestive tract cancer sites and European countries.