Normal weight with new-onset diabetes die at a higher rate than overweight/obese adults with the same disease, according to a new study published in The Journal of American Medical Association(JAMA). Normal-weight adults with type 2 diabetes have been understudied because those who typically develop the disease are overweight or obese."Many times physicians don't expect that normal-weight people have diabetes when it is quite possible that they do and could be at a high risk of mortality, particularly if they are older adults or members of a minority group," said Mercedes R. Carnethon, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and first author of the study.

A total of 2625 participants with incident diabetes contributed 27 125 person-years of follow-up. Included were men and women (age >40 years) who developed incident diabetes based on fasting glucose 126 mg/dL or greater or newly initiated diabetes medication and who had concurrent measurements of BMI. Participants were classified as normal weight if their BMI was 18.5 to 24.99 or overweight/obese if BMI was 25 or greater.

The rates of total, cardiovascular, and noncardiovascular mortality were higher in normal-weight participants (284.8, 99.8, and 198.1 per 10 000 person-years, respectively) than in overweight/obese participants (152.1, 67.8, and 87.9 per 10 000 person-years, respectively). Adults who were normal weight at the time of incident diabetes had higher mortality than adults who are overweight or obese.

Read More