Diabetes meds linked to pancreatic cancer
It is estimated that between four and six million South Africans suffer from diabetes, and many of those are not aware they have the disease. What’s more is that projected statistics for South Africa reveal a rapid increase in the incidence of diabetes especially with urbanisation of the African populations.
Earlier research has suggested that people with pancreatic cancer may have a higher risk of developing diabetes, however it is uncertain how diabetes, and the medicines used to treat it, affects a person’s risk for pancreatic cancer.
The study
In an attempt to answer that question, Dr Chistoph Meier and colleagues of the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland consulted the UK-based General Practice Research Database of more than 8 million people, including about 2800 who were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer between 1995 and 2009. They found that one in nine people with pancreatic cancer had a prior diagnosis of diabetes, while 2% of people with pancreatic cancer had been taking metformin before they were diagnosed.
When the researchers stratified subjects by gender, they found that significantly fewer women with a new diagnosis of pancreatic cancer had been taking metformin compared to a control group that has not.
The findings were reversed for insulin and sulfonylureas. Significantly more people with pancreatic cancer had a history of insulin use or sulfonylureas than cancer-free people.
The evidence suggests most people with type 2 diabetes who don’t have any medical reasons not to take metformin should be on the drug, either alone or in combination with other anti-diabetes medications.
Source: Reuters Health
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Diabetes meds linked to pancreatic cancer
by Health-e News, Health-e News
February 2, 2012