HealthDay News — There is a strong association between pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and recently diagnosed diabetes mellitus, findings from a systematic review and meta-analysis indicate.
“Selective screening of patients with new-onset diabetes mellitus for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma needs to be considered,” Pikli Batabyal, MBBS, from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and colleagues reported in Annals of Surgical Oncology.
They conducted a systematic review and identified 88 independent studies — 50 cohort and 39 case-control — that examined the association between diabetes and pancreatic cancer. A “random effects” approach was used to calculate summary estimates for case-control and cohort studies.
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The overall summary-combined relative risk for pancreatic cancer after diabetes diagnosis was 1.97 (95 % CI: 1.78–2.18), with considerable heterogeneity observed that could not be attributed to analyses of any subgroup.
The greatest risk of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma was seen early after diabetes diagnosis, but risk remained elevated for a prolonged period, the researchers found. The individual-level relative risk varied from 6.69 at less than one year to 1.36 at 10 years.
“The results demonstrate a strong association between pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and recently diagnosed diabetes mellitus, which may be attributed to a paraneoplastic effect,” the researchers wrote.
