Diabetes fundamentally a lifestyle disease: expert
By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Diet, activity level and other lifestyle factors play a pivotal role in a person's risk of developing diabetes -- even after age 65, according to a study released Monday.
"With aging, diabetes is common and it's almost entirely preventable," Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, told Reuters Health.
"Diabetes is fundamentally a lifestyle disease," he said.
Mozaffarian and colleagues tracked 4,883 men and women, aged 65 and older, over a period of 10 years. All were free of diabetes at the beginning of the study.
They collected data through annual questionnaires and physical exams and participants were grouped in low- and high-risk groups based on their physical activity level, diet, smoking habits, alcohol use, body weight and waist circumference.
During follow-up, 337 people developed diabetes, the researchers report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
According to the researchers, a person's risk of diabetes fell by 35 percent for every low-risk lifestyle factor they had.
Compared with all other study participants, the risk of diabetes was 82 percent lower for people in the low-risk groups for activity level, diet, smoking and alcohol use.
In addition, among people with these four favorable factors who either had a low-risk BMI (below 25) or a low-risk waist circumference (88 centimeters or less for women, 92 centimeters or less for men), risk was 89 percent lower.
Based on the findings, Mozaffarian and his colleagues conclude that 9 out of 10 of the cases of diabetes that occurred among the study participants could be attributed to lifestyle factors.
"There's just continuing and growing enthusiasm for the next new drug on the block, the next new gene on the block," Mozaffarian said. "We forget the basic causes and treatments for chronic diseases, especially diabetes, are not drugs and genes, but behaviors."
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, April 27, 2009.
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