Diabetes causes greater risk of cancer for women

Fri, 11 Jun 2010
A new study has found that women with diabetes can double their risk of getting cancer . Scientists at Tel Aviv University have revealed that the fact that type 2 adult-onset diabetes causes insulin-like hormones to circulate around the body has a beneficial effect on bringing down the rate of prostate cancer in men; however, this is not the case for women, as type 2 diabetes may double the risk of female genital and other cancers.

Although the study is not the first to highlight this risk, it is one of the largest to confirm it, as well as determining the statistical differences in cancer risks for men and women.

The research, which was published in the journal Cancer Causes and Control, examined 16,721 diabetics, differentiating between men and women and defining the relative cancer risks for each group.

In 2000, when the study first started, there were no subjects with a history of cancer. In the next eight years, 1,639 cases of different cancers among people with diabetes were documented; this figure was compared with the occurrences of the same cancers in a sample of 83,874 healthy non-diabetic people.

It was shown that diabetes actually appears to have a preventative effect on conditions like prostate cancer, reducing the risk of cancers associated with insulin -like hormones by 47 per cent, while the opposite also appears to be true for women.

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