Complementary and alternative medicine use in overweight and obese cancer patients with comorbidities

OBJECTIVE: Increasing rates of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by cancer patients coincide with the increasing rates of obesity in the US. To our knowledge, our study is the first to describe CAM use for the overweight and obese cancer population living with and without other chronic co-morbidities. METHODOLOGY: Data for 1,785 adult Americans with a history of cancer were obtained from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and CAM supplement. The outcome of interest was the frequency of CAM use within the overweight, obese, and normal weight cancer population. Data were weighted and analyzed using Stata software version 12 for Windows. In addition to descriptive and bi-variate statistics, multivariate logistic regression was performed to estimate the odds of CAM use by selected covariates. RESULTS: The average age of the respondents was 63 (SD 15.2 ) years and 56.4% were female. Sixty percent were overweight or obese. About 89 percent of the respondents used CAM. Respondents who are female (OR: 2.6; p=0.000), overweight (OR: 1.9; p=0.007), and in the western region of U.S. are more likely to use CAM (OR: 2.7; p=0.009). The presence of co-morbidity did not alter CAM use within the overweight or obese cancer population. In contrast to previous findings in the literature, income, education, and health insurance coverage were not significant predictors of CAM use. CONCLUSION: Overweight cancer patients were more likely to use CAM. There was no difference in CAM use within the overweight and obese cancer patients with or without co-morbidity.