He MM, Lo CH, Wang K, et al. - In this study, immune-mediated diseases were found to be linked with risk of cancer at the local and systemic levels. Observations lend support to the role of local and systemic immunoregulation in carcinogenesis.

• This is a cohort study of 478,753 participants (mean [SD] age, 56.4 [8.1] years; 54% female) from the UK Biobank cohort study.

• Cancer cases, over 4,600,460 person-years of follow-up, were 2,834 and 26,817 in patients with (n= 61,496) and without (n=417,257) immune-mediated diseases (multivariable hazard ratio, 1.08).

• Immune-mediated diseases were related to an elevated risk of total cancer.

• Organ-specific immune-mediated diseases showed stronger links with risk of local cancers vs extralocal cancers.

• The links for individual immune-mediated diseases were identified to be largely organ specific but were also noted for some malignancies in the near and distant organs or different systems.