Cancer Diagnosis Tied to Increased Risk of Diabetes

Developing cancer is a very serious, and sometimes terminal, medical diagnosis for anyone. But that already bad news may have just gotten a little worse with new research out of South Korea. It turns out, patients who have cancer are about a third more likely than non-cancer patients to develop diabetes. The South Korean study focused on over half a million people, none of whom had either cancer or diabetes when the study began. The study followed the medical history of the participants for a long period of time, more than seven years.

What researchers found was that even after other known risk factors for diabetes, such as being overweight, being a smoker, or being someone who regularly consumes alcohol, there was a thirty-five percent greater chance of someone who developed cancer to have also been diagnosed with diabetes. But the increased diabetes risk varied based on the type of cancer the patient had. For example, cancer of the pancreas increased the risk by five times. Kidney and liver cancers doubled it. Even lung tumors, an organ that play no role in digestion or blood sugar regulation, still boosted a patient’s risk by seventy percent. Worse, as the cancer remained, which many cancers do since they often cannot be easily treated in an very quick manner, the diabetes risk increased with time.

Key Points:

  • 1Cancer or the the cancer treatments themselves, may cause the patient to get diabetes.
  • 2Certain cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, have a higher incidence of diabetes than other cancers.
  • 3The incidence of diabetes in cancer patients may be due to the disease being found more often when people who have cancer get routine tests.


People who get diagnosed with cancer may be more likely to develop diabetes, a Korean study suggests.
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Written by HealthStatus
Medical Writer & Editor

HealthStatus has been operating since 1998 providing the best interactive health tools on the Internet, millions of visitors have used our health risk assessment, body fat and calories burned calculators. The HealthStatus editorial team has continued that commitment to excellence by providing our visitors with easy to understand high quality health content for many years.

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