Diabetes triples risk of liver cancer

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=20861
Main Category: Diabetes News
Article Date: 08 Mar 2005 - 13:00pm (UK)

Diabetic patients run three times the risk of developing liver cancer,
suggests a large US study in Gut.

The researchers trawled a surveillance database used for patients in
receipt of Medicare funding for health care, to identify patients aged 65
and older, who had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

They found 2061 patients with liver cancer on records spanning the five
years between 1994 and 1999. They also randomly selected more than 6,000
other similarly aged patients from the database, who had not been
diagnosed with cancer.

They checked the claims records for known risk factors for liver cancer,
including hepatitis C and B viral infections, alcoholic liver disease, and
haemochromatosis (poor absorption and storage of iron). They also checked
the claims records for diabetes.

Compared with patients who did not have the disease, those with liver
cancer were around twice as likely to be male and of non-white ethnicity.
And the proportion of patients with diabetes was almost twice as high
among those with liver cancer.

After taking into account, demographics and other major risk factors,
diabetes almost tripled the risk of liver cancer. But the findings also
suggest that hepatitis C could also interact with diabetes to further
boost the risk of developing liver cancer.

The authors suggest that diabetes might be an independent risk factor for
liver cancer, rates of which have increased significantly in the US in
recent years.

[Diabetes increases the risk of hepatocelluar carcinoma in the United
States: a population based case control study Gut 2005; 54: 533-9]

Click here to view the paper in full: (Adobe Acrobat File)

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