New research released on Wednesday highlights the role of obesity in type 2 diabetes. This indicates that obesity plays a major role in up to half of the new diabetes cases that occur annually in the US
The link between obesity and type 2 diabetes – a condition in which blood sugar levels become uncontrollable and remain too high – has been 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, one that relies on long-term data than previous studies have used. The study was led by researchers from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.
They looked at years of data from two sources. One was the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an annual survey that asks a nationally representative group of Americans about their lifestyle and eating habits. The other was the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), an ongoing study among more than 6,000 volunteers who have been tracking their health since 1999 to study heart disease. The combined data gave the researchers two different ways to study the health of Americans over a long period of time, especially middle-aged to older people.
Between 2001 and 2004, according to NHANES data, approximately 34% of Americans between the ages of 45 and 79 met the criteria for obesity (a body mass index, or BMI, of 30 and older); by the years 2013 to 2016, it had changed to 41%. In the MESA data, 11.6% of participants with no pre-existing diabetes developed the condition over a median length of nine years. And those who were obese in the MESA study were about three times as likely as non-obese people to eventually develop diabetes during the period (20% versus 7.3%).
Based on both the MESA and NHANES data, the researchers estimate that obesity is now associated with 30% to 53% of new diabetes cases seen annually. However, the impact of this relationship is not equal for all groups of people. Both obesity and type 2 diabetes are more common in people of color than whites, and black and Hispanic Americans also die more from diabetes. But the link between obesity and diabetes was actually the strongest in white women, despite the fact that this group has the lowest obesity.
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“Our study highlights the significant impact that reducing obesity can have on the prevention of type 2 diabetes in the United States. Reducing obesity should be a priority, “lead author Natalie Cameron, a resident of internal medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, said in a statement. released by the American Heart Association, which worked with the federal government to fund this study. “Public health efforts that support healthy lifestyles, such as increasing access to nutritious food, promoting physical activity, and developing community programs to prevent obesity, can significantly reduce new cases of type 2 diabetes.”
Other research has found that the incidence of new diabetes cases in the U.S. decreased between 2008 and 2018, even though obesity climbed over the same period. But the number of new births has not dropped in people under the age of twenty, and diabetes is still the seventh leading cause of death in the US. This contributed to 87,647 deaths in 2017. The authors are also concerned that the covid-19 pandemic could directly and indirectly exacerbate the situation (some research even suggested that covid-19 infection could directly contribute to a new diabetes.
‘The greater severity of covid-19 infection in individuals with obesity is due to the increasing burden of adverse health consequences they may experience in the coming years; therefore, further efforts are needed to help more adults adopt healthier lifestyles and hopefully reduce the incidence of obesity, ”said senior study author Sadiya Khan in a statement.