Do variants associated with susceptibility to pancreatic cancer and type 2 diabetes reciprocally affect risk?

Although type 2 diabetes mellitus is a known risk factor for pancreatic cancer, the existence of shared genetic susceptibility is largely unknown. We evaluated whether any reported genetic risk variants of either disease found by genome-wide association studies reciprocally confer susceptibility.

Data that were generated in previous genome-wide association studies (GENEVA Type 2 Diabetes; PanScan) were obtained through the National Institutes of Health database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). Using the PanScan datasets, we tested for association of 38 variants within 37 genomic regions known to be susceptibility factors for type 2 diabetes. We further examined whether type 2 diabetes variants predispose to pancreatic cancer risk stratified by diabetes status. Correspondingly, we examined the association of fourteen pancreatic cancer susceptibility variants within eight genomic regions in the GENEVA Type 2 Diabetes dataset.

Four plausible associations of diabetes variants and pancreatic cancer risk were detected at a significance threshold of p = 0.05, and one pancreatic cancer susceptibility variant was associated with diabetes risk at threshold of p = 0.05, but none remained significant after correction for multiple comparisons.

Currently identified GWAS susceptibility variants are unlikely to explain the potential shared genetic etiology between Type 2 diabetes and pancreatic cancer.