STUDY LINKS TYPE 2 DIABETES TO RISK OF INCREASED CANCER MORTALITY

New research published in Diabetologia shows that cancer mortality in people with type 2 diabetes is substantially higher than the general population, by 18% for all cancers combined, 9% for breast cancer, and 2.4 times for colorectal cancer.

Cancer mortality in people with diabetes was also around double that in the general population for diabetes-related cancers including liver, pancreatic and endometrial cancers.

The study, also showed increasing breast cancer mortality rates by 4.1% per year, in the younger women with type 2 diabetes, across the 20-year study period.

The study included 137,804 individuals with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes with a median follow-up of 8.4 years. The authors of the study found that all-cause mortality rates decreased at all ages between 1998 and 2018; cancer mortality rates also decreased for 55-year-olds and 65-year-olds but increased for 75-year-olds and 85-year-olds.

The authors say that decreasing cardiovascular mortality observed in older age groups, owing to successful cardiovascular prevention and treatment in the last few decades, means that people live longer now and have a greater chance of experiencing other conditions and therefore dying from other causes.

However, diabetes screening, better management of diabetes and its complications, earlier cancer detection, and improved cancer treatments seem to have benefited younger people with T2D in the same way as they have in the general population.

Constant upward trends in mortality rates were also observed for pancreatic, liver, and lung cancer at all ages, colorectal cancer at most ages, breast cancer at younger ages, and prostate and endometrial cancer at older ages. Compared with the general population, people with type 2 diabetes had a more than 1.5-fold increased risk of colorectal, pancreatic, liver, and endometrial cancer mortality during the whole study period.

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