Diabetes is a risk factor for liver cancer

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

A survey shows that people who have diabetes run a three times greater risk of liver cancer than the rest of the population.
Liver cancer is on the increase in the USA. A team at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Houston, Texas, has been looking into some of the risk factors for the disease.

They found over 2,000 patients aged 65 or more with liver cancer and compared them with a similar group without cancer. Patients with liver cancer were about twice as likely to be male and of non-white ethnicity. The proportion with diabetes was almost twice as high among those with liver cancer. After taking other risk factors into account, the doctors say that diabetes triples the risk of liver cancer. It also looks as if hepatitis C infection and diabetes interact in some way still to be determined to further increase the liver cancer risk.

Source
Gut March 2005 Volume 54 pages 533-539