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Should You Stop Use Pain Relievers So You Won't Get Kidney Cancer?

by — Last updated: 2017-12-21 in Urinary Tract Issues

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Every year 65,000 people in the United States alone are diagnosed with kidney cancer. Now doctors report that people who use non-steroidal antiinflammatory medications such as ibuprofen and naproxen sodium may be at elevated risk for the disease.
If you don't have other risk factors for kidney cancer and you don't use pain relievers like Aleve and Advil, you have about a 0.004% risk of developing kidney cancer in any given year. If you don't have other risk factors for kidney cancer and you do use pain relievers like Aleve and Advil, and you participated in the Nurses Health Study, from which the headlines-making data were taken, you have about a 0.002% risk of developing cancer. That isn't a typo, and, yes, 0.002% is less than 0.004%.
 

The scary headlines come from a study that found that nurses who take NSAID pain relievers such as ibuprofen and naproxen sodium actually have lower risk of kidney cancer than the general public, although they had a higher risk of kidney cancer than nurses who did not take these medications. Nurses who took these medications were 50% more likely to get kidney cancer than nurses who did not, but still 50% less likely to get kidney cancer than people who did not participate in the study.

Moreover, the study found that Aleve and Advil seemed to be associated with higher kidney cancer rates in nurses, but Aspirin was not. Researchers have no clear understanding of why one kind of NSAID pain reliever would be associated with kidney cancer and another NSAID pain reliever would not.

The answer might be that Aleve and Advil usually come in plastic-coated capsules, while Aspirin does not. Maybe plastic coatings cause cancer. Or maybe they prevent cancer. After all, nurses in the study were still far less likely than the general public to get this or any other kind of cancer. But there is no way to tell from this kind of study.

It's never a good idea to turn your life upside down because some new study has found some new link to a horrible disease. Here are the things to remember about scary health headlines:

  • Epidemiology does not uncover the causes of diseases. It just finds things that seem to happen together, in this case, taking otherwise harmless pain relievers and higher cancer rates. Correlation does not prove causation. Just because two things both happen doesn't mean that one causes the other—or doesn't.
  • A huge increase in a rate may mean a tiny increase in risk. If you would have a 0.001% chance of getting a disease and a certain substance would raise your risk by 100%, you would still only have a 0.002% risk of the disease. If another substance increased your risk 100-fold, your risk would still be just 0.1%.
  • As a general principle, any headline designed to scare you isn't designed to help you.

If a family member has been diagnosed with one of the hereditary conditions mentioned earlier in this article, you need to be alert to the symptoms of kidney cancer. Blood in urine, pain on just one side of the waist,  and the appearance of a lump or mass on the side of the body are sure signs a trip to the doctor is urgent.

Otherwise, simply have regular checkups with a doctor who examines all your lab results carefully. Kidney cancer is still most often diagnosed on a "hunch." You need a doctor who takes enough time to know your needs that hunches can occur.