As Dr. Jean-Paul Fagot told Reuters Health by email, ”we did not find any significant difference in the risk of all cancers, and particularly breast cancer, between new insulin glargine users and nonusers.”

In a paper online September 10 in Diabetes Care, Dr. Fagot and colleagues at the National Health Insurance Fund, Paris, note that some observational studies have raised the possibility of such a relationship.

The current study, they say, was conducted ”at the request of the French Medicines Agency (Afssaps) in response to a pharmacovigilance signal.”

The team extracted data from the French health insurance information system for more than 70,000 patients who started basal insulin between 2007 and 2009. Of these, 67.7% were treated with insulin glargine only.

The median follow-up in the insulin glargine group was 2.7 years. The cancer rates for patients with and without exposure to insulin glargine were 1,622 and 1,643 per 100,000 person-years.

After adjustment for sex, there was no significant association between use of the drug and overall cancer incidence. This remained the case after additional adjustment for any other hypoglycemic agent use and duration of diabetes.

Specifically, there was no increased risk of breast cancer (hazard ratio 1.08) or for cancers at other tumor sites including the lungs and the liver.

The researchers note that their findings are in line with most previous research.

”We think that our study, to our knowledge the largest study to date on glargine and cancer, is therefore reassuring at least for the few years following start of glargine exposure. Compared to previous studies, the mean duration of follow-up is also a little bit higher.”

Diabetes Care 2012 Sept 2012

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