Does Cocaine Use Increase Your Risk For Cancer?

If you use cocaine or you’ve used cocaine in the past, it’s important not to panic — the best thing to do is to learn about the possible risks associated with the drug, and to know it’s impact on your body so that you can talk to your doctor about it.

According to a 2015 Monitoring the Future Survey, there has actually been a huge decrease in the amount of cocaine use among teenagers since it’s peek in the 90’s, but according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2014, an estimated 1.5 million people above the age of 14 were still “current” users of cocaine, meaning they had used it within a month of taking the survey. That amounts to about 0.6 percent of the population of the United States.

The most imminent dangers of cocaine use are have to do with it’s effect on the heart. According to Dr. Yeo, they can cause blood vessels to constrict, and can put people at risk for heart attacks and stroke.

But she also talked about the cancer risk that comes along with certain other disease, that are associated with cocaine use, “In addition, if injected, there is an increase risk of blood transmitted disease (eg. Hepatitis or HIV) that raise the risk of certain cancers.”

Finally, she noted that some literature has pointed to increase blood cancer risk, “One observational study from the UK showed a slight increase in the risk of a certain kind of blood cancer.”

But she also said that the type of study done to get the research isn’t totally reliable, “but observational studies are hard to make a lot of sense out of, because they show associations and not necessarily a causation, which means that it may be something about the group that used it that put them at risk.”

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