Patients and their doctors should be aware that the onset of diabetes, or a rapid deterioration in existing diabetes that requires more aggressive treatment, could be a sign of early, hidden pancreatic cancer, according to research presented at the European Cancer Congress 2017 today . Ms Alice Koechlin, from the International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France, told the meeting that an analysis linking nearly a million patients with type 2 diabetes in Lombardy and Belgium with recorded cases of pancreatic cancer showed that 50% of all pancreatic cancers cases in the two regions were diagnosed within one year of patients being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and being given their first prescription to control it.