Why Do Diabetics Have an Increased Risk of Cancer? What Your Doctor May Not Have Told You…

  If you have diabetes, you already have enough problems on your plate. I don't want to add to them. But I'm sorry to say that two of the most common diseases in the United States — cancer and diabetes — share a stronger link than you might realize. The evidence is piling up like crazy.

    I'm not surprised. In our research at Cancer Defeated we've seen for a long time that a diet high in sugar and other refined carbs is an underlying cause of both diseases.

    We get news and tips from a large number of cancer patients and cancer survivors, and we find that when patients make the lifestyle changes needed to get rid of cancer they often get rid of diabetes while they're at it. (Sometimes they get rid of arthritis, too.) You can kill two or even three birds with one stone. 

 Researchers are now connecting the dots between the two diseases. Specifically, scientists are analyzing all the available research from multiple well-designed studies — called a meta-analysis. This approach can highlight problems that a single study might miss.

    The evidence has become so compelling that the American Diabetes Association and the American Cancer Society held a consensus conference in 2009 — exploring the association between diabetes and cancer incidence, the risk factors common to both, and the causes of both. The consensus report is published in the July/August, 2010 issue of CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

    Findings from recent studies include:

• Japanese study: Showed adults with diabetes to be at increased risk of developing several kinds of cancer… increased liver, kidney, and pancreatic cancers for men, and stomach and liver cancers for women… compared to those without diabetes.²
• University of Minnesota School of Public Health and University of Minnesota Cancer Center: Found women with diabetes were 1.5 times more likely to develop colorectal cancer than women without diabetes.
  
  Assisted by colleagues, Dr. Andrew Flood, Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, examined the records of 45,000 participants from a large study called the Breast Cancer Detection Demonstration Project.
  
  They chose participants with no history of colorectal cancer or diabetes at the beginning of the study, and focused on the ones who got colorectal cancer later on.
  
  Flood and colleagues found that women with diabetes had the greatest risk of developing colorectal cancer. "These results remained statistically significant even after controlling for all known and suspected confounding variables," stated Flood.³
• Health, Eating, Activity and Lifestyle (HEAL) Study: Women with invasive breast cancer and elevated blood levels of C-peptide, a marker of insulin secretion, had a three-times-greater risk of death than women with lower C-peptide levels.
  
  Researchers followed 689 women without type 2 diabetes for 9 years. They took regular fasting blood samples and other measurements like weight, height, age and lifestyle factors… and analyzed the link between C-peptide and risk of death, adjusting for other factors.
  
  They found the risk of death to be three times higher in the highest C-peptide group compared to the lowest C-peptide group.⁴
• South Korea: A study of more than one million South Koreans suggests diabetes can raise the risk of developing — and dying from — several kinds of cancer. The highest risks were found in people with the highest blood sugar levels, says the study, which was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
  
  Researchers analyzed data on 1.29 million South Koreans ages 30-95 through a health insurance group covering government employees, teachers and their families. The study followed participants for up to 10 years, beginning in 1992.
  
  Those with diabetes were 30% more likely to develop and die from cancer than those who were diabetes-free. Pancreatic cancer showed the closest association with diabetes. This is no surprise, since the pancreas makes insulin. But diabetics were also at higher risk of liver, esophagus and colon cancer.⁵
• Johns Hopkins: Brancati (quoted above) and colleagues analyzed research from 23 studies looking at cancer patients who already had diabetes at the time they were diagnosed with cancer. They discovered that those with diabetes had a 1.4 times greater risk of dying from cancer than patients with no blood sugar problems. Mortality was statistically higher for breast, endometrial, and colorectal cancers.⁶

    Overall, the risks from diabetes are greatest — twice as high, or more — for cancers of the liver, pancreas, and endometrium compared to people who aren't diabetic. And the risks are approximately 1.2 to 1.5 times higher for colorectal, breast, and bladder cancer.

    Lung cancer doesn't appear to be linked to diabetes. Prostate cancer is the only type of cancer found to be lower in diabetics. I don't recommend becoming diabetic to protect yourself against prostate cancer.

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