COURTESY HT NOV 25

Over half of those aged 20 now may get diabetes
Sanchita Sharma

letters@hindustantimes.com

NEW DELHI : A little over one in two men (56%) and close to two-thirds (65%) of women who are now 20 years old are likely to develop diabetes later in life, according to an international study on the lifetime risk of diabetes in people living in urban India. Lifetime risk is the cumulative probability of developing diabetes over the course of life.

Obesity raised the chances of developing diabetes substantially, with the lifetime risk being highest among obese metropolitan Indians — as high as 86% among 20-year-old women and 87% among men of the same age.

“The numbers are alarming across the spectrum of weight and rises dramatically with higher weight. The risk is 85% for people who are obese, which is massive,” said the study’s co-author, Professor Nikhil Tandon, of the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

“People with healthy or lower weight had considerably higher diabetes-free life expectancy, which means diabetes prevention, testing and treatment must be made a national priority, particularly given the rapid increase in urban obesogenic environments,” Tandon added.

Being thin lowered risk. People who have normal or underweight Body Mass Index (BMI) lived out 80-85% of their remaining years diabetes-free, compared to obese 20-year-olds who have only 46-52% of their remaining life years disease-free, according to the paper published in Diabetologia, which is the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Those who were free of diabetes at the age of 60 years had lower risk, with around 38% of women and 28% of men developing diabetes at a later age, found the study that used data from Delhi and Chennai