“We need to take their [the authors of the new study] findings with caution,” said Dr. Joel Zonszein, director of the Clinical Diabetes Center at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. “Patients with diabetes have enough problems, and they don’t need cancer on top of their complications.”
He said the lack of a plausible reason why type 1 diabetes might cause an increase in certain cancers makes him suspect that there could be another explanation for the study findings.
It’s possible, Zonszein said, that patients in this study were misdiagnosed or misclassified in the national registries used for this study. Some of them may have had type 2 diabetes rather than type 1 diabetes, he suggested. This confusion may have occurred because all the patients the researchers looked at were taking insulin, he said.
The report findings were published Feb. 29 in the journal Diabetologia.
“Lifestyle changes to reduce cancer risk — such as avoiding smoking, [and improving] weight management and physical activity — are important for people with type 1 diabetes, particularly because several of the cancers are ones where these factors affect risk,” Wild said.