Do diabetics do better after colon cancer surgery?

People with diabetes actually fare better after colon cancer surgery than people without the condition, according to surprising new findings published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

"We were really expecting to find the opposite," Dr. Geoffrey C. Nguyen of the University of Toronto, the lead researcher on the study, told Reuters Health.

Nguyen and his team looked at records for nearly 220,000 people who had colon cancer surgery at US hospitals between 1995 and 2005. Eighty-five percent didn't have diabetes, 14 per cent had uncomplicated diabetes -- meaning they didn't have diabetes-related problems like kidney disease or vision loss -- and 1 percent had complicated diabetes.

While 3.2 per cent of the non-diabetic patients died in the hospital after surgery, 2.5 percent of those with diabetes did. The difference only appeared among patients with uncomplicated diabetes, 2.4 per cent of whom died, compared to 4.2 percent of the patients with complicated diabetes.

This translated to a 29 per cent lower risk of death among patients with uncomplicated diabetes.

Twenty eight percent of patients with uncomplicated diabetes had complications related to surgery, for example an infection, compared to 31 per cent of non-diabetics, giving them an 18 per cent lower risk.