Diabetes-Cancer Connection Confirmed [STUDY]

Diabetes affects millions of Americans. It’s what happens when your body doesn’t produce enough insulin or use it effectively.

Diabetes also affects how your body uses glucose for energy and leads to elevated blood sugar levels.

It’s hard to overstate the damage caused by high blood sugar.

If your levels stay too high for too long, damage can occur in any organ in your body. This can lead to heart disease, nerve damage, vision loss, and more.

Most people already know about these diabetes complications.

What many don’t realize is that type 2 diabetes also increases the risk of certain deadly cancers.

Researchers studied over 23,000 people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes (called “new-onset”) and matched them to over 70,000 people without diabetes.

After five years, they determined that having new-onset diabetes was associated with a 48 percent increased risk of obesity-related cancers in men and a 24 percent increased risk in women.

This means that for every 100 men without diabetes who developed these cancers, about 148 men with diabetes did.

Breaking the numbers down by specific cancer type, new-onset type 2 diabetes was associated with the following:

• 27 percent increased risk of bowel cancer in men, and 34 percent increased risk in women
• 74 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer for men and nearly twice the risk for women
• For liver cancer, almost four times the risk in men and five times the risk in women

Obesity-related cancers are ones in which obesity is a significant risk factor. And since obesity often occurs in combination with type 2 diabetes, in this case, it could have been the underlying reason for the increased cancer risk.

But it wasn’t. The researchers found that the increased cancer risk was independent of BMI (Body Mass Index, a measure of body fat based on height and weight).

This means that type 2 diabetes increases the risk of these cancers in some way that’s unrelated to too many fat cells.

Of course, the answer to the question of how diabetes increases cancer risk wasn’t addressed in this study. It could be related to hormone levels, high insulin levels, chronic inflammation, or some combination of all these factors.

A study like this one is an excellent reminder of how vital it is to make the necessary changes to reduce your type 2 diabetes risk. These include improving your diet, exercising regularly, and limiting added sugars.

If you already have diabetes, it highlights the importance of working with your healthcare provider to keep your blood sugar under control.

P.S. Powerful kitchen hacks roll back cancer risk.

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New research to be presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2025, Malaga, Spain, 11–14 May)