New research released Wednesday highlights the role of obesity in type 2 diabetes. This suggests that obesity is a major factor in up to half of new cases of diabetes that occur annually in the United States.
The link between obesity and type 2 diabetes – a condition in which blood sugar levels become uncontrollable and remains too high – is well established. The authors say their new study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, provides a more recent estimate of the frequency of obesity that contributes to diabetes, one that is based on longer-term data than previous studies. The study was led by researchers at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.
They analyzed 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 Atherosclerosis Study (MESA), an ongoing study of more than 6,000 volunteers whose health has been monitored since 1999 to study heart disease. The combined data provided researchers with 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 above); by 2013 to 2016, it had changed to 41%. According to MESA data, 11.6% of participants without pre-existing diabetes developed the condition over an average of nine years. And those who were obese in the MESA study were about three times more likely that non-obese people would eventually develop diabetes at that time (20% versus 7.3%).
Based on MESA and NHANES data, researchers estimate that obesity is now associated with 30% to 53% of new cases of diabetes observed annually. However, the impact of this relationship is not equal in all groups of people. Both obesity and type 2 diabetes are more common among people of color than whites, and black Americans and Hispanics are also more likely to die from diabetes. But the link between obesity and diabetes was actually the strongest in white women, despite this group having the lowest rates of obesity in general.
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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. Reducing obesity must be a priority, “said the study’s lead author, Natalie Cameron, a resident physician in internal medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, in a statement. released by the American Heart Association, which helped fund this study with the federal government. “Public health efforts that support healthy lifestyles, such as increasing access to nutritious food, promoting physical activity and developing community programs to prevent obesity, could substantially reduce new cases of type 2 diabetes.”
Other research has found that the incidence of new cases of diabetes in the US decreased between 2008 and 2018, even though the rate of obesity increased at the same time. But the rate of new annual cases has not dropped in people under the age of 20, and diabetes is still the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, having contributed to 87,647 deaths in 2017. The authors are also concerned. that the covid-19 pandemic could further aggravate the situation, both directly and indirectly (some research even suggested that covid-19 infection may directly contribute to new-onset diabetes).
“The higher severity of covid-19 infection in obese people is worrying because of the growing burden of the negative health consequences it could experience in the coming years; therefore, further efforts are needed to help more adults adopt healthier lifestyles and hopefully reduce the prevalence of obesity, ”the study’s lead author, Sadiya Khan, said in a statement.