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Most U.S. clinicians have minimal experience with familial Mediterranean fever (FMF), but FMF isn't rare in the region for which it's named. (In my practice, I have one patient with FMF, a man of Turkish descent.) Because FMF is a so-called “autoinflammatory” disorder, with recurrent episodes of fever and serositis, researchers wondered whether the chronic inflammatory burden might result in an excess incidence of cancer. To address this question, Israeli researchers performed a retrospective study in which they linked a national FMF registry and a national cancer registry.
About 8500 patients were diagnosed with FMF from 1979 through 2008; most were Sephardic Jews (i.e., of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern origin). In analyses adjusted for a…