Objective The aim of this study was to determine the clinicopathological characteristics of nasopharyngeal carcinoma(NPC) patients complicated with type 2 diabetes mellitus.Methods A total of 902 patients who had integrity clinical dams with NPC confirmed pathologically in Fujian Provincial Cancer Hospital from January 2012 to December 2012 were included in this study.We analyzed the differences in clinicopathologicai features between type 2 diabetes mellitus patients and non-diabetic patients according to age of diagnosis, gender, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, histological type and TNM staging.Results The male to female ratio was 2.66:1 in the 902 NPC cases.50 patients were also diagnosed as having diabetes mellitus and accounted for 6%.The average of fasting blood glucose and glycated hemoglobin were significantly higher in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus than the patients without when admitted to hospital.The size of the primary tumor staging were similar in the two groups.The proportion of lymph node or distant metastasis in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients was higher than that in non-diabetic patients(16% vs 6%).Moreover, the proportion of Ⅳb group was significantly higher than the non-type 2 diabetes.No significant differences were observed between both groups in terms of gender, hypertension, hyperlipidemia and histological type.Conclusions NPC patients with T2DM had a higher proportion of lymph node and distant metastasis than in non-diabetic patients, which suggested diabetes mellitus may promote the metastasis of NPC and play a role in disease progression.