Color blindness may lower bladder cancer survival rates, research suggests

Could being colorblind make you less likely to get bladder cancer? That’s the surprising hypothesis researchers have proposed based on a small study.

The study, published Jan. 15 in Nature Health, looked at data from 135 patients with both bladder cancer and color blindness and compared them to 135 patients with bladder cancer alone. Data was obtained from TriNetX, an international registry of electronic medical records of more than 275 million patients.

Among these health records, both those with color blindness and those diagnosed with bladder cancer had shorter survival times than bladder cancer patients without visual impairment. Overall, people with color blindness had a 52% higher risk of dying within 20 years of bladder cancer diagnosis compared to the group with normal vision.

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The study authors suggested a plausible reason for this observed difference. Color blindness can make it difficult to see blood in the urine, an early sign of cancer, and can delay diagnosis.

“Bladder cancer is a bad disease. If it’s diagnosed late, the prognosis changes,” Dr. Veeru Kashivisvanathan, a urological oncologist and surgeon at University College London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

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Blood in the urine is one of the most common early symptoms of bladder cancer, along with frequent urination. Pain or burning sensation while urinating. You feel like you need to urinate even when your bladder is not full. and urinate frequently during the night.

Kashivisvanathan said if there is blood in your urine, you should seek immediate medical attention. However, as the study authors suggested, this early warning sign can be very difficult to spot because red and yellow cannot be clearly distinguished.

Color blindness, also known as color blindness, is a fairly common condition, with recent studies reporting that around 1 in 40 people worldwide have some form of color vision deficiency. (These numbers may be approximate, as screening for color blindness is often not routine.) Research shows that color blindness tends to be more common in men than women.

The results of the new study should be taken with extreme caution, Kashivisvanathan and Shangming Chou, a professor of e-health at the University of Plymouth who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. Indeed, the study authors acknowledge that their study has significant limitations.

For example, because color blindness is often undiagnosed, some people with color blindness may be mistakenly added to the non-color blind cohort in the analysis, clouding the results. The term “color blindness” also includes a variety of conditions that differ in the ability to perceive the color red. In this context, deuteranopia (red blindness) should theoretically carry a higher risk than deuteranopia (green blindness), but this study cannot distinguish between these subtypes, Zhou said.

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Furthermore, this study was very small, making the results less reliable and making it difficult to screen for other factors that could explain the difference in prognosis. Finally, these data alone cannot prove that color blindness delayed disease diagnosis. For now, it’s just a hypothesis.

“The authors appropriately frame this as a hypothesis-generating work,” Zhou said. “Current evidence is insufficient to recommend routine blood cancer testing.” [patients with color vision deficiency]the absolute increased risk remains unclear,” he stressed.

This means more research is needed to confirm that color blindness increases the risk of death from bladder cancer and, if so, to assess how these patients can be better protected. Still, this is the “correct type” [study] It’s designed to address these types of questions,” Kashivisvanathan said, adding that while the study is not definitive, it opens up interesting areas of investigation.

Patients with known risk factors for bladder cancer (such as being male over age 50, smoking, taking blood thinners, or having a history of radiation therapy) may benefit from being alerted to the potential risk of undiagnosed color blindness in addition to other risk factors. And perhaps people with known color blindness or cancer risk factors could be encouraged to screen their urine in other ways, such as using test strips, Kasivisvanathan said.

Professor Zhou added that the study also raises questions about other cancers that are associated with blood in body fluids in their early stages, such as oral cancer. But for now, all experts said more research is needed.