Female diabetics more likely to develop breast cancer, according to study

Mon, 24 Oct 2011
A new piece of research from Canada has claimed that women who have been recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes could be at a higher risk of developing breast cancerbreast cancer than women without diabetes.

The scientists investigated data on around 170,000 women in British Columbia, half of them having recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and the other half being diabetes-free, monitoring them over a four or five year period. Over that timeframe, around 1.4 per cent of the patients were diagnosed with breast cancer.

Although those in both groups had about the same chance of developing breast cancer, when age and time after the diabetes diagnosis were considered, the study, which was published in Diabetes Care, showed that older, post-menopausal women with diabetes were at a slightly higher risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer than women without diabetes.

For women with diabetes diagnosed in the last three months that were 55 and older, they were revealed to be around 30 per cent more likely to also receive a breast cancer diagnosis than women without diabetes. However, the findings could be to do with these women being more likely to have had a health check.

As researcher Jeffrey Johnson pointed out "When a new diagnosis of diabetes is made, people undergo a lot of tests and general health exams," including breast cancer screening, and also admitted that "We're really early on in understanding this relationship."

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