The prevalence of diabetes in China is close to 10%, and poor lifestyle and genetic factors are the main causes of the disease, but there has been no conclusive answer as to which of these two causes is greater or lesser. Recently, a new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK says that the risk of diabetes from poor lifestyle is much higher than the genetic risk. The results have constructive implications for overall diabetes control strategies.
People with type 2 diabetes and healthy individuals were genetically and lifestyle controlled. They assessed the genetic risk of each study subject based on the 49 genetic variants they carried that are currently known to be associated with type 2 diabetes, and examined the combined effect of genetic risk and lifestyle on them. The results of the study showed that over a ten-year period, the proportion of normal weight individuals with type 2 diabetes ranged from 0.25% to 0.89% depending on their genetic risk, while for obese individuals this proportion expanded to between 4.22% and 7.99%, about four times more. This suggests that the risk of diabetes is much higher in obese individuals than in those of normal weight, whether or not they are influenced by genetic factors. In other words, the impact of poor lifestyle is much higher than genetic factors in the risk of diabetes.
The causes of type 2 diabetes are complex and are often the result of an interaction between genetic factors and poor lifestyles. Breakthroughs in genetic technology have allowed scientists to understand more and more about the pathogenesis of diabetes. However, the impact of genetic risk factors on diabetes has been exaggerated compared to the impact of poor lifestyles. New research suggests that focusing on addressing the poor lifestyles that lead people to become obese has a greater role to play in overall diabetes control strategies than developing targeted control strategies for individual genetic risk factors.