Study finds more years of obesity tied to higher risk of diabetes

A recent study has found that a bigger waistline for a long period could be tied to a higher risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases.

Research published this week in the peer-reviewed journal, PLOS Medicine, showed the more years a person has been obese, the greater risk they’ll have of developing diabetes, heart disease or stroke. These are cardiometabolic disease risk factors and it’s been hypothesized that the duration that someone has obestity affects the variation of the chance of developing them.

Tom Norris of Loughborough University, U.K., and his colleagues used data from three British birth cohort studies of 20,746 participants that collected information on body mass index from age 10 to 40.

It also gathered information on cardiometabolic disease risk factors including measurements of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.

Researchers determined a link between worse values for all measured cardiometabolic risk factors and more years of obesity. That link was especially strong in blood sugar measurements — participants with less than five years of obesity had a 5% higher blood sugar level compared to people who had no years of obesity.

Meanwhile, the blood sugar of people who had 20 to 30 years of obesity was 20% higher than those with no obesity.

The increased risk continued when adjusting for a strong measure of the severity of obesity during the lifespan.

Other cardiometabolic disease risk measures, including blood pressure and the so-called good cholesterol, were also tied to a longer duration of obesity. Researchers pointed out those measures were mostly reduced when adjusting for the severity of obesity.

“Given that the obesity epidemic is characterized by a much earlier onset of obesity and consequently a greater lifetime exposure, our findings suggest that health policy recommendations aimed at preventing early obesity onset, and therefore reducing lifetime exposure, may help reduce the risk of diabetes, independently of obesity severity,” the authors concluded.