Diabetes mellitus and cancer in Werner syndrome

Onishi et al. recently reported here an association of diabetes mellitus (DM) with neoplasm type in newly identified patients with Werner syndrome (WS), an autosomal recessive cancer predisposition syndrome with features of premature aging that include a high risk of DM (Onishi et al. in Acta Diabetol 49(Suppl 1):259-260, 2012; Epstein et al. in Medicine 45:177-121, 1966). In contrast, we did not detect an association between DM and neoplasm type in an independent WS cohort we assembled to determine the histopathologic spectrum and type-specific risk of neoplasia in WS.