Prevalence of metabolic syndrome in childhood cancer survivors

Abstract

In Brazil, cancer affects around twelve thousand children per year. Many of them when submitted to a treatment have increased chances to develop metabolic syndrome when compared to another child. Introduction: Adolescents and children treated of cancer are propitious to develop metabolic syndrome due to changes that radiotherapy and chemotherapy provides. These dysfunctions compromise fat tissue, muscle, skeletal, endothelium tissue, gastrointestinal tract and the liver. Objectives: Evaluate the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in children treated of cancer and compare with parameters investigated. Materials and methods: Thirty-eight patients of GPACI Hospital that had finished cancer treatment in five years at least were analyzed. It was considered variations such as: plasma glucose, blood pressure, waist circumference, HDL, triglycerides, cancer type, treatment type and familiar historical. As control group, we used 20 siblings of the analyzed patients under the same parameters. Results: Survivors had increased risk to develop metabolic syndrome (RR 2,11 Mid-p 0,27). HDL was the index with most alterations in control group and in the studied group (less or equal 45mg/dLin 46% of volunteers). Comparing the studied group with the control group, the waist circumference was the most important factor (RR 5,2 Mid-p 0,02). Discussion: As seen in other reports, the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in the group survivors of pediatric cancer was superior to the control group and also higher than the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents of USA. Conclusion: Waist circumference was statiscally significant with a RR 5,2 (mid-p 0,02). Differently from other studies, the other factors were not relevant, probably because the sample size.