Diabetes Remain Stable While Obesity Rates Going Up: By Brenda Neugent
There’s good and bad news on the health front right now.
Even though, our waistlines are getting bigger, which is bad news when it comes to cardiovascular disease, new cases of diabetes are remaining stable.
Diabetes is being diagnosed more often now than in recent decades, according to a study that appeared in the American Diabetes Association journal Diabetes Care.
Researchers led by Dr. Tobin M. Abraham of Boston’s Harvard Medical School examined trends over the past four decades, using data from the Framingham Heart Study, a decades-long project to identify heart disease risk factors that began in 1948. Researchers focused on 4,795 participants aged 40 to 55 years.
From the 1970’s, diabetes cases have nearly doubled among the focus group, but between the 1990’s and 2000’s, incident rates drop slightly for both men and women.
“In our community-based sample, the risk of new-onset diabetes continued to be higher in the 2000’s compared with the 1970’s,” the authors writes. “In the past decade, diabetes incidence remained steady despite the ongoing trend of rising adiposity.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of all American adults are currently classified as obese, which led to an estimated $147 billion in health care costs in 2008. West Virginia and Mississippi have the highest obesity rates and are the only two states with obesity rates greater than 35 percent.
