Could allergies protect against cancer?

Friday October 31st, 2008

People who suffer from allergies may enjoy some protection against developing cancer, according to a new analysis.

Allergy symptoms may protect against cancer by ridding the body of cancer-causing foreign particles, say Dr Paul Sherman and colleagues from Cornell University, New York, USA. They also believe that allergy symptoms help warn people that there are substances in the air which should not be inhaled.

The links between allergies and cancer have been investigated for many years, but no definite conclusions have been reached. So the team analysed nearly 650 studies from the past fifty years.

What they discovered was that some allergies seem to protect against some cancers and not others. Cancers with a reduced risk tended to affect organs that have direct contact with the environment, such as the mouth and throat, colon and rectum, skin, cervix, pancreas and some brain cells.

The only allergies which were protective were those that affected areas that are directly exposed to the environment - eczema, hives, hay fever and animal and food allergies.

Given their potential benefits, should antihistamines and other allergy medications still be recommended? The answer is unclear, say the experts, as there is a possibility that excessive medication may suppress natural protection against cancer.

"We hope that our analyses and arguments will encourage such cost/benefit analyses," they state. "More importantly, we hope that our work will stimulate reconsideration of the current prevailing view that allergies are merely disorders of the immune system which, therefore, can be suppressed with impunity."

Results are published in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology.

Sherman, P. W., Holland, E. and Shellman, J. Allergies: Their Role In Cancer Prevention. The Quarterly Review of Biology, December 2008.

Tags: Allergies & Asthma | Cancer | North America

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