Associação entre epigastralgia e o consumo de açaí em uma amostra de população com alta prevalência de câncer gástrico

Abstract

Historically, the State of Pará has a high incidence of gastric cancer. In 2018-2019, according to the National Cancer Institute, gastric cancer was the second most frequent in men (12.35/100,000 inhabitants) and the fifth most frequent in women (5.34/100,000 inhabitants in the North Region). Often, the diet of the local population is pointed out as an important factor for the occurrence of epigastric pain, gastritis and gastric cancer. It was hypothesized that the excessive consumption of some elements of this cuisine may contribute to an excess of stomach acidity, increasing the activity of the H+/K+ pump in the parietal cell membranes of the stomach, which extracts K+ from the lumen and pumps H+ into it, acidifying -O. Therefore, the following research intends to investigate the association between the consumption of açaí, often consumed with cassava flour, both rich in K+, and the manifestation of epigastralgia. Thus, data from a center and thirty-three (133) patients were used in this crosssectional study, data from 133 patients treated at the Hepatology and Gastroenterology Clinic of CESUPA were used through a cross-sectional study. Data analysis was performed using the statistical computing program R (www.r-project.org), calculating the prevalence ratio (PR, ± 95% confidence interval [ICI95% ]), in addition to analyzing proportions with Fisher's exact test (alpha = 0.05). This work was approved by the Ethics Committee (Opinion 5,429,013). Obtaining as a result that patients who consume açaí were more likely to present epigastric pain as a clinical symptom (PR = 3.692 [CI95%: 1.226-10.14], p = 0.0247). Concluding that the consumption of açaí may have a prone effect to epigastric pain. However, further investigations need to be carried out to better clarify this finding.