medwireNews: Analysis of the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study suggests that the purported link between type 2 diabetes and renal cell carcinoma (RCC) risk may exist only in women.
Alejandro Sanchez (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA) and study co-authors suggest this could represent a genuine gender difference in risk, noting that in the general population men have a higher RCC risk than women do.
The risk for RCC was elevated 1.53-fold among the 5265 women with diabetes compared with the 105,979 without, after accounting for factors including BMI, hypertension, smoking, and physical activity. By contrast, there was no difference in RCC risk between the 1594 men with and the 44,786 without diabetes.
Among women, the elevated RCC risk was confined to those with diabetes of less than 5 years’ duration. The researchers say this could represent detection bias, with cancers uncovered during a period of increased healthcare contact, or an effect of hyperinsulinemia early in the course of type 2 diabetes.
“However, it is unclear why these proposed mechanisms would play a role in women but not in men with diabetes,” they write in Diabetes Care.
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