Childhood cancer survivors treated with total body or abdominal radiation may have an increased risk of diabetes, according to a report in the August 10/24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. This correlation does not appear to be related to patients’ body mass index or physical inactivity.
“As a result of their curative therapies, childhood cancer survivors face an increased risk of morbidity and mortality,” with almost 75 percent of survivors developing a chronic health condition and 42.4 percent developing a severe, disabling or life-threatening condition 30 years after diagnosis, according to background information in the article. Cardiovascular disease, in particular, is a significant cause of deaths in this group. “In the general population, diabetes mellitus is strongly associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause death.”
Lillian R. Meacham, M.D., of Emory University and AFLAC Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service, Atlanta, and colleagues compared the prevalence of diabetes in a sample of 8,599 childhood cancer survivors (diagnosed before age 21 between 1970 and 1986) and 2,936 randomly selected siblings of the survivors (average ages 31.5 and 33.4 at follow-up in 2003, respectively). Medication use, treatment exposures (including irradiation, or exposure to radiation treatments) and factors that may have modified the risk of diabetes were noted.