Research highlights dangers of diabetes

A 50-year-old with diabetes dies six years sooner than a person without the disease, and not just from a heart attack or a stroke, new research suggests.

The large international effort to measure diabetes' toll found the disease 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.

Beyond 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 information for 820,900 people from nearly 100 studies done mostly in Europe and North America. The results are published 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. The most common kind, Type 2, 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 research didn't include those who had heart disease when they were first enrolled. Participants were followed on average for 13 1/2 years, and there more than 123,000 deaths. Overall, death rates from various causes were higher for those with diabetes than those without.

The researchers took into account other risk factors such as age, gender, smoking and weight. Type 2 diabetes is tied to obesity.

They found that those with diabetes had double the risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke, compared with those without it. But they also found that 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. In the case of infections, it could be that it weakens the immune system, they 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 it with depression, he noted.