According to British scientists, patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes who are overweight (not obese) live longer than those with normal body weight. On such occasion, the researchers have emerged with another example of “obesity paradox”.
While public health authorities constantly emit warnings regarding adverse consequences of overweight and companies are pressuring their employees to lose weight through “wellness programs”, the relationship between weight and longevity is a paradox. Studies have shown that, although obesity increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, patients with these diseases and who are overweight live longer than patients who have normal weight, informs Reuters.
Similarly, obesity increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. However, nobody has come to a certain conclusion whether overweight patients have a significant advantage over normal people, once they are diagnosed with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
A number of sixteen previous studies have generated contradictory results: some have shown that overweight diabetics have a lower mortality rate. Others have shown the opposite. But many of them were flawed due to methodology problems such as: low number of patients, too short time for monitoring, and the use of questionnaires and medical records instead.
The authors of the new study attempted to avoid these problems and to obtain credible results. The researchers, coordinated by professors Stephen Atkin and Pierluigi Costanzo from Hull University in the UK, have monitored a sample of 10,568 patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes for an average 11 years.
Although the obese and overweight patients showed an increased risk of heart attack and stroke, they presented a higher probability to live longer than diabetics with a normal body weight – says this new study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Diabetics with body weight below average had the highest risk of death during the study, showing a mortality rate almost three times higher than normal weight patients. Overweight patients had the best survival rate – 13% higher compared to diabetics with normal weight and obese diabetics.
The BMI is defined as the body mass divided by the square of the body height.
Overweight people have a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 29. People with normal weight have a BMI in the range of 18.5 and 24.9, and obese people have a BMI of over 29.
