From Your Health Journal…..”This web site reviews various health related stories a couple times a day to lead our visitors to great web sites with stories that we feel are important. I encourage many of the visitors to Your Health Journal to visit the MedPage Today web site. It is one of the best kept secrets for health stories. The article today discusses how an obesity hormone is linked to pancreatic cancer. Low levels of the obesity-related hormone adiponectin are associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer. This study also provides additional evidence for a biological link between obesity, insulin resistance, and pancreatic cancer risk and also suggest an independent role of adiponectin. Why is this important? Well, early detection by the assessment of adiponectin has the potential to improve the survival rates of pancreatic tumor patients. I highly recommend reading this article, and browsing through the MedPage Today web site.”

From the article…..

Low levels of the obesity-related hormone adiponectin are associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer, researchers reported.

In a case-control study, pancreatic cancer patients had significantly lower levels of the hormone than controls in blood samples drawn at least a year before their diagnosis, according to Ying Bao, MD, ScD, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues.

The association was independent of smoking, diabetes, body mass index, and other known or suspected risk factors for pancreatic cancer, Bao and colleagues reported online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The findings “provide additional evidence for a biological link between obesity, insulin resistance, and pancreatic cancer risk and also suggest an independent role of adiponectin,” they concluded.

The etiology of pancreatic cancer — the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. – is not well understood, the researchers noted. However, they added, evidence is growing that obesity is an important risk factor, suggesting that adiponectin, secreted primarily by adipose tissue, might also play a role.

To investigate, they turned to five large, long-running prospective cohorts, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, the Physicians’ Health Study, the Women’s Health Initiative, and the Women’s Health Study.

Among the nearly 360,000 participants, they found 468 people who had developed pancreatic cancer, had given a blood sample more than year before the diagnosis, and had not had any other cancer, aside from nonmelanoma skin cancer.

The researchers also randomly selected 1,080 controls, who were matched by cohort, age, smoking and fasting status, and month of blood draw.

To read the full article…..Click here