Prescription drugs tied to digestive cancer risk in older adults

In older adults from the SEER-Medicare database, researchers evaluated potential links between oral prescription medications and digestive cancer risk. Older adults increasingly use prescription drugs, but traditional clinical trials are not designed to assess long-term outcomes such as digestive cancers, which directly participate in drug absorption and metabolism. To systematically detect these signals, the authors conducted a multi-stage case-control drug-wide association study across 442 oral prescription medications. Follow-up analyses addressed confounding by adjusting for comorbidities and incorporating active comparators alongside propensity scores. In the initial scan, 218 drugs were associated with digestive cancer, and 28 were inversely associated. The study confirmed several previously reported associations while revealing novel drug-cancer relationships.