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12-03-2020 | Epidemiology | News

‘Remarkably high’ lifetime risk for developing diabetes in metropolitan cities in India

Author: Alba Ruzafa

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medwireNews: People living in metropolitan cities in India have a high likelihood of developing diabetes, with a particularly elevated risk in overweight and obese individuals, research shows.

Shammi Luhar, from the University of Cambridge in the UK, and colleagues obtained data from several databases and used a Markov model to estimate the lifetime risk for developing diabetes among people living in Indian metropolitan cities (defined as cities with over 4 million inhabitants); this accounted for over 5% of the Indian population at the time of the last census.

The authors estimated that at 20 years of age, the lifetime risk for developing diabetes was higher in women than in men, at 64.6% and 55.5%, respectively. This risk was reduced with older age; at 40 and 60 years the remaining lifetime risk was 59.2% and 37.7% among women, respectively, and a corresponding 47.3% and 27.5% among men.

The model predicted a greater age-specific lifetime risk for developing diabetes in higher versus lower BMI groups. At age 20 years the risk for underweight or normal-weight men was 41.2%, compared with 71.3% and 86.9% among overweight and obese men, respectively. A similar pattern was seen in women; the risk among those who were underweight or had a normal BMI was 51.6% versus 71.0% and 86.0% for those who were overweight or obese.

When assessing the percentage of remaining life spent without diabetes, Luhar et al say that 20-year-old women can expect to spend 71.6% of their remaining 54.4 years of life without diabetes, while men can expect to be free from diabetes for 75.9% of their remaining 52.6 years.

The study authors also found that the estimated proportion of remaining life spent without diabetes “varied considerably” across BMI groups. At age 20 years, underweight or normal weight women and men can expect to spend the majority (79.6 and 84.7%, respectively) of their remaining life without diabetes, while obese women and men of the same age had a diabetes-free expectancy of 51.8% and 45.7 %, respectively, of their remaining life.

“The remarkably high lifetime risk of developing diabetes and the low diabetes-free life expectancy in urban India, especially for individuals with high BMI, implies that interventions targeting the incidence of diabetes may be of paramount importance moving forward,” concludes the team in Diabetologia.

medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare Ltd. © 2020 Springer Healthcare Ltd, part of the Springer Nature Group

Diabetologia 2020; doi:10.1007/s00125-020-05330-1

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