Harmful effect of repetitive intravenous iodinated contrast media administration on the long-term renal function of patients with early gastric cancer

This retrospective study investigated whether repetitive exposure to intravenous iodinated contrast media (ICM) affects long-term renal function in patients who undergo curative surgery for early gastric cancer (EGC) collected from the Korean Health Insurance and Review Assessment (HIRA) database. Patients diagnosed with gastric cancer between January 2010 and December 2013 underwent regular computed tomography (CT) scans to monitor for extragastric recurrence. Patients who already had chronic kidney disease (CKD) before cancer diagnosis or had undergone chemotherapy or repeated surgery were excluded. A nested case–control study design was chosen to analyze the effect of repetitive ICM exposure to long-term renal function by comparing patients who developed CKD 2 years after cancer diagnosis and patients who did not. Among 59,971 patients collected according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 1021 were diagnosed with CKD 2 years after cancer diagnosis. Using 1:5 matching after adjusting for age, sex and date of cancer diagnosis, 5097 control patients were matched to 1021 CKD patients. Conditional logistic regression showed that the number of CTs taken using ICM slightly increased the odds of CKD (odds ratio, 1.080; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.059, 1.100; P < 0.0001). Thus, the administration of ICM might contribute to chronic renal function impairment.