Association between Gout and Gastric Cancer: A Nested Case-Control Study Using a National Health Sample Cohort

Abstract

Given the global significance of gout and gastric cancer (GC) as major health problems with interrelated impacts, we examined the development of GC in Korean patients with gout. We conducted a nested case-control study using data from 10,174 GC patients and 40,696 control patients from the Korean National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort database. Propensity score matching (1:4) with propensity score overlap-weighted adjustment was used to reduce selection bias and estimate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between gout and GC. An adjusted OR for GC was not significantly higher in patients with gout than in control patients (1.02; 95% CI, 0.93-1.12; p = 0.652). Additionally, no association between gout and GC was observed in subgroup analyses such as sex, age, level of income, region of residence, or Charlson Comorbidity Index score. In conclusion, these results suggest that gout is not a significant independent risk factor for GC among the Korean population. Additional investigation is required to establish a causal association between gout and GC, and to generalize these results to general populations.

Keywords: gastric cancer; gout; national healthcare data; nested case–control study.

Figure 1

A schematic flowchart of the patient selection method. Among the initial pool of 1,127,681 participants, 10,174 patients with gastric cancer were carefully matched with 40,696 control patients based on factors such as age, sex, level of income, and region of residence.