A Warning Sign for Pancreatic Cancer Could Be Diabetes
Talk about lifestyle diseases and diabetes is sure to top the list. It is a killing machine, literally, affection millions of people worldwide. The shocking part is that more and more young people are falling prey to it. Blame it on the times we live it with unhealthy lifestyle choices that dangerous diseases like this are on the rise. Type 2 diabetes or Diabetes Mellitus is a life-long condition when the insulin hormone produced by our pancreas is not utilised properly by the cells to break down glucose into energy. As such, the blood sugar level goes up in the body and it could trigger a series of other health issues in the long run.
According to a study done by International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France, the onset of diabetes, or a rapid deterioration in existing diabetes that requires more aggressive treatment, could be a sign of early, hidden pancreatic cancer. The research was presented at the ongoing European Cancer Congress 2017 held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The findings are based on an analysis linking nearly a million patients with Type-2 diabetes in Italy and Belgium with recorded cases of pancreatic cancer. “Half of all pancreatic cancers cases in the two regions were diagnosed within one year of patients being diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes and being given their first prescription to control it,” said researcher Alice Koechlin.
“In Belgium 25 per cent of cases were diagnosed within 90 days and in Lombardy (Italy) it was 18 per cent. After the first year, the proportion of diagnosed pancreatic cancers dropped dramatically,” she said.
Among patients who already had Type-2 diabetes and were managing it with oral anti-diabetic drugs, the switch to incretins (metabolic hormones that stimulate the pancreas to produce more insulin to lower blood glucose levels) or insulin happened faster among diabetic patients who were subsequently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In addition, a deterioration in their condition that necessitated them being switched to more aggressive anti-diabetic therapy with injections of insulin was associated with a seven-fold increased risk of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the study said.
“There is currently no good, non-invasive method for detecting pancreatic cancer that is not yet showing any visible signs or symptoms. 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,” Koechlin said.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal cancers, partly because it is difficult to detect at an early stage and because there are few effective treatments for it. Less than one per cent of people live for ten or more years after a diagnosis.
[“source-ndtv”]
