A team of researchers from Israel and North America have shown that overweight and obese people, despite having healthy cholesterol and blood pressure levels, are still at an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Researchers studied around 34,000 young men with ages between 25 and 36 and no markers of increased diabetes risk such as high blood pressure, high triglyceride levels or low HDL cholesterol.
The research reviewed diabetes diagnosis rates over the next 6 years. As participants were young, diabetes diagnosis rates over the 6 years were not high. 734 diagnoses occurred in the monitoring period, representing 2% of the men being studied.
The researchers measured diabetes rates as the number of diagnoses per 1,000 patient years of three different groups; those that had a healthy BMI, those that were overweight and those that were obese.
The diabetes incidence rates between the three groups were as follows:
Healthy BMI: 1.15 diagnoses per 1,000 patient years
Overweight: 2.10 diagnoses per 1,000 patient years
Obese: 4.34 diagnoses per 1,000 patient years
With obese patients having nearly a four times higher risk of diabetes within a 6 year period than people with a healthy BMI, the result suggest that being overweight is still associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes regardless despite having healthy metabolic markers, such as normal blood pressure and cholesterol.
The bottom line, therefore, is that if you are overweight don’t take diabetes for granted, even if your health numbers are healthy.
