Study finds just how fast diabetes cuts lives

The large international effort to measure diabetes’ toll found it also raises the risk of dying prematurely from a host of other ailments, even breast cancer and pneumonia.

“It’s quite a wide sweep of conditions,” said Dr. John Danesh of Cambridge University in Britain, who led the team of researchers. While most people think of heart problems, diabetes surprisingly “appears to be associated with a much broader range of health implications than previously suspected.”

Putting the six years lost in context, he said, long-term smoking shortens life by 10 years.

The analysis used pooled medical information for 820,900 people from nearly 100 studies done mostly in Europe and North America. The results are in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Diabetes, the seventh-leading cause of death in the U.S., affects about 26 million Americans, or 8 percent, including 7 million who haven’t been diagnosed. Most in the study were thought to have the most common kind — Type 2 — which occurs when the body makes too little insulin or cannot use what it does make to regulate blood sugar.

High blood sugar can damage nerves and blood vessels, and is a major cause of heart disease.

The new study didn’t include those who had heart disease when they were first enrolled. Participants were followed on average for 13½ years, and there more than 123,000 deaths. Overall, death rates from various causes were higher for those with diabetes than without.

The researchers took into account other risk factors that could influence the results: age, gender, smoking and weight. Type 2 diabetes is tied to obesity.

They found those with diabetes had double the risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke, compared to those without the disorder. But they also found diabetics had a 25 percent higher risk of dying from cancer and were more likely to die from a variety of illnesses, including infections, lung and kidney disease as well as falls.

Exactly how diabetes raises those risks isn’t clear, but in the case of infections, it could be that diabetes weakens the immune system, the researchers said.

Diabetes can cause vision problems and loss of feeling in the legs, which may be the reason for falls, they said.

Danesh said one intriguing finding was a higher risk of suicide in those with diabetes. Other research has linked diabetes with depression, he said.

The results are “another reason to try to normalize blood glucose in people who have diabetes,” through diet, exercise and medication, said Dr. Alvin Powers, a specialist at Vanderbilt University.

(–Originally sourced from the Associated Press)