About 10% of people living with myositis—a rare inflammatory disease in which the immune system attacks healthy muscle cells—also are at risk for developing cancer. Determining which patients need screening and close follow-up is difficult.

“We screen a lot of people aggressively, and possibly unnecessarily,” says rheumatologist Christopher Mecoli, M.D., M.H.S., director of research operations and physician lead for the Myositis Precision Medicine Center of Excellence. This can lead to potential harms for patients such as radiation exposure, anxiety and false-positive test results that indicate a person has cancer when they actually do not.

Similarly, individuals who were diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 40 years died ten years earlier, and those diagnosed at the age of 50 died six years earlier than their healthy counterparts.

A robust association was established between earlier age of diabetes diagnosis and deaths due to vascular and non-neoplastic conditions. Common vascular diseases include stroke and myocardial infarction, while non-neoplastic conditions include neurological, respiratory, and infectious diseases.

The association between life expectancy and diabetes was marginally greater in women than in men. Compared to older adults, higher hazard ratios for mortality were associated with earlier age of diabetes detection.

A clinical trial led by NCI has resulted in FDA approval of the immunotherapy drug atezolizumab (Tecentriq) to treat advanced alveolar soft part sarcoma.