Diet and gastrointestinal cancers

Gastrointestinal cancers represent a major public health issue, with increasing incidence and mortality. Dietary, environmental, and lifestyle factors play a key role in their development. Malnutrition, common among cancer patients, influences their prognosis and complicates their treatment. Despite the importance of this diet-cancer association, local research and publications remain limited. The main objective of our study was to identify dietary factors predisposing to gastrointestinal cancers.This was a comparative cross-sectional study, conducted between November 18, 2024, and December 20, 2024, and between January 20, 2025, and February 15, 2025. This study involved 31 patients with gastrointestinal cancers, recruited from among those hospitalized at Charles Nicolle Hospital in Tunis, as well as controls with irritable bowel syndrome. We compared 31 patients followed for gastrointestinal cancers and 31 patients followed for irritable bowel syndrome. Colorectal cancer was the most common.