Heavy consumption of hot dogs, sausages and luncheon meats, along with other forms of processed meat, was associated with the greatest risk of pancreatic cancer in a large multiethnic study reported today at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
"The results suggest that carcinogenic substances related to meat preparation, rather than their inherent fat or cholesterol content, might be responsible for the association," said Ute Nöthlings, DrPH, MSE, the study's lead investigator from the Cancer Research Center at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
Meat consumption has been linked to pancreatic cancer in several case-control studies in the past, but the results have been inconsistent and data from prospective studies has been lacking.
For this study, researchers from the Cancer Research Center and USC examined the relationship of diet to pancreatic cancer among 190,545 men and women of African-American, Japanese-American, Caucasian, Latino and Native Hawaiian origin who were part of the Multiethnic Cohort Study in Hawaii and Los Angeles. An average follow-up of seven years yielded 482 incident cases of pancreatic cancer.