Increased Prevalence of Neoplasms In Patients Diagnosed with Common Variable Immunodeficiency.

Common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) is a heterogenous disorder characterized by hypogammaglobulinemia, poor specific antibody responses, and increased numbers of infections. In addition, patients with CVID have been reported to carry an increased risk of developing other co-morbidities, including autoimmunity and certain types of neoplasms. Data establishing the overall risk and prevalence of these co-morbidities in patients with CVID has been limited due to the small sizes of patient cohorts examined to-date, and the lack of comprehensive primary immunodeficiency registries. The objective of this study was to document the prevalence rates of lymphoma select neoplasms in a large cohort of patients with CVID.

The MedStat MarketScan database, which contains approximately 48 million patients, was evaluated for the number of IVIG-treated CVID patients using the 279.06 ICD-9 code for CVID over a 6-year period (2002-2008). Ten-fold the number of randomly selected patients, based on age, gender and length of enrollment, were used for matched control comparisons to our CVID cohort. Each cohort was evaluated for the rate of select neoplasms using ICD-9 codes for malignant lymphatic and hematopoietic tissue neoplasms (ICD-9 codes 200 to 208).

814 CVID patients with at least 18 months of data were identified in the database, with 61% being female and 39% being male. The average age for females and males was 45 and 37 years, respectively (p<.0001). The CVID cohort carried a significantly higher prevalence of having a diagnosis code for a malignant neoplasm of the lymphatic and hematopoietic tissue than the control cohort [10.1% vs. 0.6%, respectively (p<.0001)]. Most of these neoplasm diagnoses occurred after the diagnosis of their CVID; however, 26.8% of neoplasm diagnoses occurred before the diagnosis of CVID. Additionally, the rates for each of the select neoplasms examined showed a significantly higher rate in the CVID cohort than in the control cohort.

This study showed that CIVD patients have a higher prevalence of being co-diagnosed with certain neoplasms than matched controls. These data also suggest that CVID patients should not only be evaluated longitudinally for the development of neoplasms, but that certain cancer patients may also need to be considered and evaluated for underlying immune deficiencies such as CVID.

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