AUTHOR=Tai Chi-Jung , Yang Yi-Hsin , Tseng Tzyy-Guey , Chang Fang-Rong , Wang Hui-Chun 

TITLE=Association Between Digoxin Use and Cancer Incidence: A Propensity Score-Matched Cohort Study With Competing Risk Analysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Pharmacology

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.564097

DOI=10.3389/fphar.2021.564097

ISSN=1663-9812

ABSTRACT=Background: Previous studies neglected death as a critical competing risk while estimating the cancer risk for digoxin users. Therefore, the current study aimed to assess the effectiveness of digoxin on cancer prevention by competing risk analysis.
Methods: We performed a population-based retrospective cohort study using the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database between 1998 and 2010. After one-to-one propensity score-matching from 36,160 patients with defined criteria, we enrolled 758 patients both in digoxin and β-blocker group for further analysis.
Results: The results showed that the digoxin group had higher all-cause mortality than the β-blocker group in the 4-year (10.4% vs. 4.9%) and 8-year (13.6% vs. 7.0%) follow-up. The subdistribution HR of cancer incidence in the digoxin group compared to the β-blocker group was 1.99 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.22–3.01) and 1.46 (95% CI: 1.01–2.15) in the 4-year and 8-year follow-up, respectively.
Conclusions: The result of our study showed the usage of digoxin has no benefit in cancer prevention compared with β-blocker. The possibility of β-blocker as new drug candidate for cancer prevention needs further clinical evaluation. The current study also emphasized the necessity of competing risk analysis applying to similar clinical researches.