medwireNews: Patients with a new diagnosis or rapid deterioration of type 2 diabetes should be considered for pancreatic cancer, suggested research presented at the European Cancer Congress in Amsterdam.
Half of all pancreatic cancers detected in diabetes patients in the study were diagnosed within 1 year of onset. And 25% of the 885 cases detected among 368,377 Belgian diabetes patients and 18% of the 1872 cases among 456,311 French patients were diagnosed within 90 days of the diabetes diagnosis.
Pancreatic cancer was also associated with treatment escalation. In the Belgian cohort there was a 3.3-fold increased risk for a pancreatic cancer diagnosis during the first 3 months after receiving a first prescription for an incretin-based drug, with the risk falling thereafter although remaining significant for diagnoses more than 12 months later.
Likewise, starting on insulin treatment was associated with an 11.9-fold increased risk for a subsequent pancreatic cancer diagnosis in the Belgian cohort.
“There is currently no good, non-invasive method for detecting pancreatic cancer that is not yet showing any visible signs or symptoms”, commented presenting author Alice Koechlin (International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France) in a press statement.
“We hope that our results will encourage the search for blood markers indicating the presence of pancreatic cancer, which could guide decisions to perform a confirmation examination like endoscopy,” she concluded.
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