1. ¹Department of Neurology, St Elisabeth Hospital, PO Box 90151, 5000 LC Tilburg, The Netherlands
2. ²Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
3. ³Comprehensive Cancer Centre South, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
4. ⁴Pharmo Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands
5. ⁵Foundation PALGA, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Correspondence: Dr MPWA Houben, Department of Neurology, St Elisabeth Hospital, PO Box 90151, 5000 LC Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail: m.houben@erasmusmc.nl

Received 24 November 2005; Revised 12 January 2006; Accepted 18 January 2006; Published online 21 February 2006.

Abstract

We pursued an association between hypertension and gliomas by investigating whether antihypertensive drugs (AHD) are associated with an increased glioma risk by a population-based nested case–control study using the PHARMO database; this links dispensing records of prescription drugs to hospital discharge data on an individual basis. Pathological data were derived from the Dutch nationwide registry of histo- and cytopathology. A total of 306 glioma cases incident between 1997 and 2003 were matched to 1108 controls for year of birth, sex, geographical region and duration of follow-up. Exposure was defined as cumulative duration of AHD use and, in an alternative analysis, as cumulative dose. We estimated the magnitude of the association with conditional logistic regression analysis. Cumulative use of any AHD for more than 6 months was associated with an increased risk of glioma (OR 1.45; 95% CI 1.03–2.04). After stratification for different groups of AHD, no significantly increased risk of glioma was found for any class of AHD. After excluding a latency period of 3 years before the date of diagnosis, no association was found. In conclusion, the use of AHD seems to be associated with an increased risk of glioma, but this is probably not causal.