Noe people with type 2 diabetes there is a higher incidence and higher mortality some types of cancer. This is confirmed by a growing number of evidences, the latest of which consists of a funded study by the British non-profit association Hope Against Cancer and appeared on «Diabetes»the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes EASDwhich analyzed data spanning two decades, from January 1998 to November 2018, of nearly 138,000 Britons registered in the database Clinical Practice Research Datalink.
Type 2 diabetes and cancer mortality risk
The team of researchers from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, including the Italian Francesco Zaccardi, deputy director of the Leicester Real World Evidence Unit, measured the incidence of pathologies and the causes of death for the various subgroups, stratifying the subjects by sex, by age group, body mass index and socio-economic status.
In the period considered, there was a reduction in the mortality rate for all causes and all ages. In addition, cancer mortality was found to be substantially higher in people with type 2 diabetes than in the general population. The risk is increased more than 1.5-fold in colorectal, pancreatic, liver and endometrial cancer. In particular, mortality from cancer is higher by 18% for all cancers, by 9% for breast cancer and by 2.4 times for colorectal cancer.
The reasons for the link
The reason for the increased cancer risk in people with type 2 diabetes could lie, according to researchers who have been dealing with it for some time, in the effects of prolonged exposure to high levels of sugar and insulin and chronic inflammation. Cancer and diabetes are both chronic pathologies on the rise in the world, and have many risk factors in common, such as alcohol consumption, smoking, obesity, physical inactivity and advanced age; their link is much studied and it has long been known that diabetes worsens the prognosis of cancer and increases the likelihood of recurrence, so much so that treating diabetes in cancer patients is extremely important.
A message for the prevention of diabetes 2
The impact of these data currently concerns mainly the planning of prevention and early diagnosis actions, as is already the case with cardiovascular comorbidities. Thus the person with type 2 diabetes will be carefully monitored also from the point of view of oncological pathology. As the researchers hope, ‘targeted cancer prevention and early detection strategies are needed to address persistent inequalities in the elderly, poor and smokers population’.
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