Childhood Obesity Is Risk Factor for Adult-Onset Diabetes

FRIDAY, March 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Childhood adiposity is a risk factor for four of five subtypes of adult-onset diabetes, according to a study published online Feb. 27 in Diabetologia.

Yuxia Wei, from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and colleagues performed a Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis using data from European genome-wide association studies of childhood adiposity and adult-onset diabetes, including latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA; which is a proxy for severe autoimmune diabetes) and four subtypes of type 2 diabetes: severe insulin-deficient diabetes (SIDD), severe insulin-resistant diabetes (SIRD), mild obesity-related diabetes (MOD), and mild age-related diabetes (MARD).

The researchers observed positive genetically predicted effects for higher levels of childhood adiposity with LADA, SIDD, SIRD, and MOD (odds ratios [95 percent confidence intervals], 1.62 [1.05 to 2.52], 2.11 [1.18 to 3.80], 2.76 [1.60 to 4.75], and 7.30 [4.17 to 12.78], respectively), but not for MARD (odds ratio, 1.06; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.70 to 1.60).

“Our analyses indicate that childhood obesity is a risk factor for four of the five proposed novel subtypes of adult-onset diabetes, regardless of whether they are classified as being primarily characterized by autoimmunity, insulin deficiency, insulin resistance or obesity,” the authors write. “Childhood obesity appears to be a risk factor for essentially all types of diabetes in adults, except for mild age-related diabetes. This stresses the importance of preventing obesity in children.”

One author disclosed financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline.