Newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes may serve as a potential marker for pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer has an extremely highly case fatality. Diabetes is a well-established strong risk factor for pancreatic cancer. Compared with a nondiabetic population, we previously reported a 15- and 14-fold greater risk for detecting pancreatic cancer during the first year after diagnosing diabetes in adult women and men, respectively, which dropped during the second year to 5.4-fold and 3.5-fold, respectively, and stabilized around 3-fold for the rest of the 11-year follow-up in our historical cohort. The population attributable risk during the 11-year period was 13.3% and 14.1% in prevalent diabetic women and men, respectively. This means that one out of about every 8 patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer has been previously diagnosed with diabetes. The globally high prevalence of diabetes and the aggravating implications of a delayed pancreatic cancer diagnosis call for newly-onset diabetes to be considered a potential marker for an underlying pancreatic cancer and addressed accordingly.