New research published on Wednesday highlights the role of obesity in type 2 diabetes. It suggests that obesity has a significant factor in up to half of new diabetes cases that occur annually in the US
The link between obesity and type 2 diabetes, a disease in which blood sugar levels are uncontrollable and remain too high, is well established. But the authors say their new study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, provides a more recent estimate of how often obesity contributes to diabetes, which is based on long-term data than previous studies. The study was led by researchers at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.
They analyzed years of data from two sources. One was the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an annual survey that asks a group of nationally representative Americans about their lifestyle and eating habits. The other was the Multi-Ethnic Atherosclerosis Study (MESA), an ongoing study of more than 6,000 volunteers who have had health monitoring since 1999 to study heart disease. The combined data gave researchers two different ways to study the health of Americans over a long period of time, mostly from middle-aged people to the elderly.
Between 2001 and 2004, according to NHANES data, about 34% of Americans between the ages of 45 and 79 met the obesity criteria (a body mass index or BMI of 30 or more); for the years 2013 to 2016, this had changed by 41%. In MESA data, 11.6% of participants without preexisting diabetes developed the disease for an average of nine years. And those who were obese in the MESA study were about three times more likely than non-obese people to develop diabetes during this period (20% versus 7.3%).
Based on data from MESA and NHANES, researchers estimate that obesity is now associated with 30% to 53% of new cases of diabetes observed annually. But the impact of this relationship is not the same for all groups of people. Both obesity and type 2 diabetes are more common among people of color than whites, and blacks and Hispanic Americans are also more likely to die of diabetes. But the connection between obesity and diabetes was actually stronger in white women, although this group had lower overall obesity rates.
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“Our study highlights the significant impact that reducing obesity could have on the prevention of type 2 diabetes in the United States. Decreasing obesity should be a priority,” he said in a statement. the study’s lead author, Natalie Cameron, a resident physician in internal medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. released of the American Heart Association, which helped fund this study along with the federal government. “Public health efforts to support healthy lifestyles, such as increasing access to nutritious food, promoting physical activity and developing community-based programs to prevent obesity, could substantially reduce new cases of type 2 diabetes. “.
There is other research Found that the incidence of new cases of diabetes in the US decreased between 2008 and 2018, although the rate of obesity has increased during this same time. But the rate of new annual cases has not decreased in people under the age of 20 and diabetes remains the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, contributing to 87,647 deaths in 2017. The authors are also concerned that the covid-19 pandemic could further worsen the situation, both directly and indirectly (some research has even suggested that covid-19 infection may directly contribute to new-onset diabetes).
“The increased severity of covid-19 infection in obese individuals is worrying because of the growing burden of adverse health consequences they could experience in the coming years, so additional efforts are needed to help more adults adopt healthier lifestyles and we hope to reduce the prevalence of obesity, ”study author Sadiya Khan said in a statement.