Drugs “thiopurine” or drugs “immunosupressive” that prevents the immune system normally used to treat inflammatory bowels disease, the researchers said. Unfortunately this drug can increase the risk of cancer associated with the virus.

Drugs “immunosupressive” involves actions that reduce the activity or efficacy of the immune system.

Beaugerie Laurent and colleagues at Saint Antoine Hospital in Paris, studied more than 19,000 patients with inflammatory bowels disease. As many as 30 percent of patients using “thiopurines”, 14 percent have stopped using it and 56 percent had never used it.

Having followed the development of all the patients for nearly three years, the researchers found 23 new cases of cancer. One patient attacked “Hodgin’s lumphoma” and 22 more “non-Hodgin lymphoma.

Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a type of lymphoma, cancer that stemmed from white blood cells called “lymphocytes”.

Statistical analysis showed that all patients who receive “thiopurine” like “azathioprine”, which produced several generic drug makers, and by Glaxo SmithKline with the name “Imuran” increases risk of “lymphoma” five times higher than those who never used the drug, the researchers said in the journal “The Lancet”.

Male patients older with a history of inflammatory disease of the stomach contents of older also have increased risk of cancer “lymphoma”.

“The risk of accumulation of absolute … in young patients who receive path” thiopurine “for 10 years remains low, less than 1 percent and not reduce the positive risk benefit ratio of this drug,” the researchers wrote, as reported to the British news agency Reuters.

But for older patients and for the treatment without limit, further studies are needed to assess the risks, they said.

When commenting on these studies, Geert D’Haens from Imelda GI Clinical Research Center and Paul Rutgeerts of the University Hospital Gesthuisberg, both in Belgium, said doctors should be cautious in prescribing the drug “thiopurine” for a long time.

But they said that despite the increased risk of “lymphoma”, the drug “will probably remain one treatment milestone”.