Color blindness may lower chance of survival in bladder cancer, study hints
Could being color blind reduce your chances of surviving bladder cancer? This is the surprising hypothesis that researchers proposed based on a small study.
The research, published January 15 in the journal Nature Healthexamined data from 135 patients with both bladders cancer and color blindness, and compared these patients to 135 patients with bladder cancer alone. The data comes from TriNetX, an international registry of electronic health records of more than 275 million patients.
The study authors suggested a plausible reason for this observed difference: color blindness may make it more difficult to detect blood in your urine – an early sign of cancer – thus delaying diagnosis.
“Bladder cancer is a bad disease. If you delay your diagnosis, it will make a difference to your prognosis,” Dr Veeru Kasivisvanathana urological oncologist and surgeon at University College London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
A possible link
Blood in the urine is one of the most common early symptoms symptoms of bladder canceralongside frequent urination; pain or burning during urination; feeling like you need to urinate even if your bladder is not full; and urinating frequently during the night.
If anyone notices blood in their urine, they should see their doctor immediately, Kasivisvanathan said. But, as the study authors suggest, the inability to clearly distinguish red from yellow could make it very difficult to spot this warning sign.
Color blindness, also known as color vision deficiency, is a fairly common condition a recent study reporting that approximately 1 in 40 people worldwide suffer from some form of color vision deficiency. (These figures are probably approximate, because color vision deficiency screening is often not a routine.) Color vision deficiency tends to be more common in men than in women, according to the study.
The results of the new study should be taken with extreme caution, Kasivisvanathan and Shang Mingzhouprofessor of eHealth at the University of Plymouth who was not involved in the work, told Live Science. Indeed, the study authors also acknowledged that there are major limitations to their research.
For example, because color blindness often goes undiagnosed, it is possible that some people with this condition were mistakenly added to the cohort without color blindness in the analysis, which could confound the results. The term “color blindness” also encompasses various conditions with different red perception abilities. Protanopia (red blindness) should theoretically carry a higher risk than deuteranopia (green blindness) in this setting, but the study cannot differentiate between these subtypes, Zhou said..
Additionally, the study was very small, making the results less reliable and making it difficult to find other factors that might explain the difference in prognosis. Finally, from these data alone, it is not possible to prove that color blindness delayed the diagnosis of the disease; For now, this is just a hypothesis.
“The authors rightly present this as hypothesis-generating work,” Zhou said. “Current evidence is insufficient to recommend routine blood cancer screening in [patients with color vision deficiency]and the absolute increase in risk remains uncertain,” he stressed.
In short, further research is needed to confirm that color blindness increases the risk of death from bladder cancer and to assess how these patients might be better protected, if that is the case. However, it is “the good type of [study] design for this type of question,” Kasivisvanathan said, adding that while the research is not conclusive, it opens up interesting areas of investigation.
It is possible that patients with bladder cancer risk factors – such as being a man over 50, smoking, using blood thinners or having a history of radiotherapy – could benefit from being warned of the potential risk of undiagnosed color blindness in addition to its other risk factors. And perhaps people with color blindness and known cancer risk factors could be encouraged to test their urine in other ways, such as using test stripsKasivisvanathan said.
This study also raises questions about other cancers associated with blood in body fluids in their early stages, such as oral cancers, Zhou added. But for now, more research is needed, all the experts said.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to offer medical advice.
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