Smokers with Diabetes have high risk of early death!

As per the recent study by Kavita Garg, an Indian-origin researcher at the University of Colorado-Denver in US, diabetic persons with heavy smoking habit have double the risk of early death.

Diabetes is a chronic health disease with high blood glucose levels. Diabetic people also face many other health complications.

Kavita Garg, Professor at the University of Colorado-Denver in United States said: “The study found that diabetes doubles the risk for all-cause mortality and non-lung cancer mortality among heavy smokers”.

As per the study, nearly 13% of diabetic patients died early compared to 6.8% of patients without diabetes.

Diabetic patients who participated in the study are older and reported long years of smoking with higher BMI compared to others without diabetes.

The study also revealed that women with diabetes have higher risk of lung-cancer mortality which was not found in men.

Kavita Garg and colleagues conducted study on 53,454 participants from United States. The analysis was done on the relative risk of overall mortality, lung cancer mortality and non-lung cancer mortality with diabetes.

There were 3,936 total deaths, which include 1,021 lung cancer deaths and 826 deaths from non-lung cancer over the course of the study.

Based on this study, Kavita said that smokers have to undergo lung cancer screening and should also control their diabetes.

She noted that: “Patients have to take care of their diabetes to maximize the benefit of CT screening for lung cancer. It truly makes a magnitude of difference in mortality risk”.

The presentation of this study will be shown at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago of United States.