Diabetes a Sign of Pancreatic Cancer

The results of a population-based study have shown that new onset of hyperglycemic diabetes in adults 50 or older may be a sign of underlying pancreatic cancer. The results of the study were published in the August 1, 2005, issue of Gastroenterology.

The risk of developing the cancer within three years of a new diagnosis of diabetes is eight times higher than for the average same-age individual. Pancreatic cancer claims 32,000 lives in the United States alone each year and has an equal number of diagnoses annually. Patients seldom show disease-specific symptoms until the cancer is at an advanced stage, mainly because of two major obstacles. One is the lack of a high-risk group in whom the cancer is common, and the other is the lack of a blood test for pancreatic cancer that is similar to the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for prostate cancer.

This new study, involving 2,122 patients 50 or older, shows that new-onset diabetes now defines a high-risk group for pancreatic cancer. Although about 1% of patients who met fairly stringent criteria for diabetes developed pancreatic cancer within three years, in most patients the cancer was at an advanced stage at diagnosis. Since patients in the study had not been screened for diabetes or pancreatic cancer, the research team was looking at those diagnosed after the fact.

"Our goal now is to identify a marker in the blood that will enable us to distinguish diabetes associated with pancreatic cancer from the far more common type 2 diabetes, so we are able to screen patients with new-onset diabetes to detect pancreatic cancer before it spreads,” said lead investigator Dr. Suresh Chari, M.D., a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN, USA).




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