Is Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus a Predisposal Cause for Developing Hepatocellular Carcinoma?

Hepatic cancer stands as one of the frontier causes of cancer related mortality worldwide. Among the several risk factors already established, type 2 diabetes is now considered as one of the important risks in progression of liver cancer. Studies have shown that likelihood of occurrence of liver cancer is many folds higher in patients diagnosed with type II diabetes compared to patients without diabetes. Liver plays an important role in metabolism of glucose in our body, so may be type II diabetes as it is an important epiphenomenon of hepatic diseases such as liver cirrhosis, liver failure, fatty liver, chronic hepatitis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Some reports suggested that extensive change in enzyme structures in molecular level in diabetic patients may lead to liver function damage and hence accelerate hepatic cancer. Other strong links between these two diseases are non alcoholic fatty liver diseases and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis which are metabolic disorders caused by type II diabetes and eventually develops hepatocellular carcinoma. However, it still remains unanswered whether prevention of diabetes would effectively lower the chances of developing liver cancer or eliminating diabetes from the population would effectively reduce the liver cancer incidence. In this review, we will primarily focus on the molecular link between type2 diabetes and hepatic cancer and investigate underlying mechanism to establish type II diabetes as predisposed cause of hepatic cancer.