Association between serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D level and gastric adenocarcinoma – a cross sectional study

Abstract

Introduction: Vitamin D is found to have anti-cancer properties. Although the preventive role of vitamin D in cancer is proven, its role in gastric cancer is equivocal.Aim: To evaluate vitamin D deficiency in patients with gastric adenocarcinoma and its relationship with the disease characteristics.Material and methods: This single-centre, prospective, cross sectional study was carried out from February 2017 to December 2018. Serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels of 94 patients with gastric adenocarcinoma and 94 age-and sex-matched healthy controls were estimated. Among cases, vitamin D levels and disease characteristics such as TNM stage, tumour grade, clinical stage and patient demographics were analysed.Results: The vitamin D levels among cases (13.83 ±5.97 ng/ml) were significantly lower (p < 0.0001) than the control group (29.15 ±4.13 ng/ml). Vitamin D deficiency was found in 88% of cases and in 3% of controls. Among cases, age, T stage and clinical stage had a significant inverse relationship with vitamin D levels. Cases with distant metastasis and cases with pain had significantly lower levels of vitamin D compared to the cases without distant metastasis and without pain respectively. Other study parameters did not have a significant relationship with vitamin D.Conclusions: Vitamin D deficiency is associated with occurrence of gastric adenocarcinoma and correlates with the disease severity. However, to assign a causal relationship and to study the beneficial effect of vitamin D in gastric cancer, further research is needed.

Vitamin D and gastric cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…The literature screening process and results are shown in Figure 1. Including 8 case-control studies [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] ,2 cross-sectional studies [11,12] .All come from India, Iran, Turkey, South Korea,China and other Asian countries. The basic characteristics and the quality evaluation of the literature are shown in Table 1.…”

“…After reading the title and abstract, 746 articles were excluded. After reading the full text, 10 articles were nally included [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] ,The screening owchart is shown in Figure 1. Including 1159 cases of gastric cancer patients, 33387 cases of normal control patients.…”

“…The total score is 9 points. The total score of included studies is ≥6 points, which is considered high quality [9] .The research scores included in this study are all ≥6 points, and the total average score is 8 points.Evaluation of 2 cross-sectional studies using the cross-sectional study evaluation criteria recommended by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) [10] ,The full score is 11 points, and the two studies are 9 points [11] and 8 points [12] ,both of which are high-quality articles. The scoring results are shown in Table1.…”

“…Among the included 10 studies, only 7 studies [11][12][13][14][15][16][17] compared the serum vitamin D levels of the gastric cancer experimental group and the normal control group, compared 730 cases of gastric cancer with 33387 cases of normal individuals, and conducted Meta on 7 studies. Signi cant heterogeneity was found during analysis (I 2 =99%, P<0.00001).…”

“…Six studies [12,14,[17][18][19][20] reported the serum vitamin D levels of patients with different clinical stage of gastric cancer. A total of 650 patients with gastric cancer were analyzed, including 429 patients with stage III/IV and 221 patients with stage I/II.…”