Diabetics At Risk For Cancer Death

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By TARA PARKER-POPE

Diabetes has long been associated with a host of serious health problems, including increased risk of vision loss, kidney problems, heart attack and stroke. Now a growing body of research shows that diabetes also increases risk for deadly cancers.

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute collected diet, lifestyle and health data from 500,000 people ages 50 to 71 and followed the patients for 11 years. They found that having diabetes was associated with an 11 percent increased risk of dying from cancer among women and a 17 percent increased risk of cancer death among men.

Having diabetes not only increased risk for dying from cancer, but people with diabetes were, over all, more likely to be given a cancer diagnosis as well.

“It’s well known that there are a lot of benefits from avoiding diabetes,’’ said Dr. Neal D. Freedman, investigator in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute. “Our study, along with others, suggests that there may be additional benefit in terms of reduced morbidity and mortality from cancer.”

The researchers found diabetes was associated with a higher overall risk for colon, rectal and liver cancers among both men and women. In women, diabetes was most strongly associated with a higher risk of stomach, anal and endometrial cancers. In men, diabetes was most likely to raise risk for pancreatic and bladder cancers, according to the report, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Over all, women with diabetes were 8 percent more likely to develop cancer. The findings were more complicated for men. Men with diabetes were 4 percent less likely to get a cancer diagnosis, but that number was skewed by the finding that diabetes lessened the risk of prostate cancer.

Research has suggested men with diabetes are less likely to develop prostate cancer as a result of having lower testosterone levels. However, most prostate cancers aren’t fatal, so the negatives of having diabetes far outweigh any protective effect the disease might have on prostate cancer. When prostate cancer was excluded from the data, the research showed that for men, having diabetes was associated with a 9 percent increased risk of a cancer diagnosis.

Although earlier research has also suggested that diabetes increases cancer risk, the new study is important because of its large size and years of follow-up. The study did not distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, so it’s not clear if the heightened cancer risk is the same for the different forms of diabetes.