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Decreased Prevalence of Cancer in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis: A Case-

Control Study. (Summary)

Melisa S. Gonzalez

Professor Maria C. Gonzalez

PSY2012

Miami Dade College

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Name of the article: Decreased Prevalence of Cancer in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis: A

Case-Control Study.

Author: Pierre Clavelou and Emilie Dumont

Name of the journal: Plos One

In the article “Decreased Prevalence of Cancer in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis: A

Case-Control Study,” authors Pierre Clavelou and Emilie Dumont present an innovative research

about lifetime cancer prevalence in a substantial group of people suffering from multiple

sclerosis. They were also interested in evaluating the DMTs (Disease Modifying Therapies) as a

cancer risk factor and to analyze if the widespread presence of cancer differs from patients with

different disease trajectory. To achieve their objective, they conducted a survey to 1574 members

of an administrative area in France that is called “Multiple Sclerosis Patients’ Network in

Auvergne.” One aspect that was taken into consideration to select these patients was that they

were not receiving any immunomodulatory or immunosuppressant treatments for their chronic

conditions. In addition, among the 1574 individuals that were questioned, only the response of

1107 of them was used for statistical analysis.

The research described in this article is of great relevance because, unlike previous

studies based on cancer extensiveness, it investigates the risk of being diagnosticated with cancer

in individuals of the same geographic area. Although, all types of cancer were taken into

consideration as well as tobacco use and alcohol consumption as two major risk factors for this

disease, it was not possible to evaluate the risk for each type of cancer since there was not

enough number of cancers of each type for such analysis. Additionally, the researchers explain

that self-reporting of cancer could be seen as a bias even though the symptoms to look for cancer

were the same in both patients and databases.

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One important result of this research was to identify that among the patients suffering

from multiple sclerosis, 7.32% had never suffer from cancer, while 12.63% of them had been

victims of these terrible disease. They found that breast cancer is the most common type of

cancer among patients with this condition. It was also demonstrated that patients that suffer from

rheumatoid arthritis and use methotrexate as medication have an increased risk of lymphoma.

This is a significant result that could lead to further researches to find an effective alternative for

this treatment. Moreover, they concluded that DMTs did not influenced the risk of developing a

cancerous disease and that the course of multiple sclerosis did not affect cancer prevalence.

Through this study, Clavelou and Dumont also demonstrated that there was a decreased

widespread of cancer risk in patients that suffer from multiple sclerosis.

In conclusion, the article “Decreased Prevalence of Cancer in Patients with Multiple

Sclerosis: A Case-Control Study,” written by Pierre Clavelou and Emilie Dumont, describes a

series of actions taken by these two researches in order to demonstrate that multiple sclerosis is

associated with a reduced overall cancer risk. It is crucial to highlight that this article mentions

ethical considerations that were conducted during the study. For example, it indicates that the

patient’s association database was approved by the National Commission of Data Processing and

Civil Liberties (CNIL), in accordance with French Law. It also emphasizes that the entire

research was approved by the Institutional Review Board. On the other hand, the article follows

the four steps of the scientific method since it introduces a hypothesis, describes the process of

gathering objective data, provides a detailed analysis of the results obtained and the article was

published and peer reviewed.

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