'Diabetes increases cancer risk'

Diabetics are at an increased risk of cancer, warns a study. It also suggests that diabetes is linked with poorer survival following a cancer diagnosis.

For the most common cancers, individuals with diabetes face a 20 percent greater risk of developing colorectal cancer and a five percent higher risk of breast cancer compared with their diabetes-free counterparts.

People with diabetes already diagnosed with cancer also fare worse, with a 25 percent and 29 percent higher chance of dying following a breast and prostate cancer diagnosis (respectively) than their peers without diabetes.

Hulda Hrund Bjornsdottir, from the Swedish National Diabetes Register (NDR), Sweden, and colleagues found that diabetes was associated with 11 out of the 12 specific types of cancer investigated in the study.

Diabetes was clearly linked with higher risk of cancers of the liver (people with diabetes were 231 percent more likely to be diagnosed with liver cancer than those without a history of diabetes over the study period), pancreas (119 percent), uterus (78 percent), penis (56 percent), kidney (45 percent), gallbladder and bile ducts (32 percent), stomach (21 percent), and bladder (20 percent).

There was evidence that those with diabetes were at a reduced risk of prostate cancer (18 percent) compared to their peers without diabetes. The absolute 5-year risk of developing cancer for the cancer sites highlighted in the study ranged from 0.02 percent for penis cancer to 1.45 percent for prostate cancer for people with diabetes. Read Complete Article