An interesting study has been released in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that obese people who contract diabetes live longer than normal weight people who develop the disease!  What’s up with this?  So now, if I have diabetes, I don’t have to worry about losing weight?  Not so fast.  As always, the results aren’t clear cut and the researchers are trying to determine what the results mean for how people with diabetes should react.  The study followed 2,600 people who developed diabetes during the study.  12% of them were of normal weight.   2.8% of the normal weight participants died during the study while only 1.5% of the obese participants died.  The study controlled for age, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking, which are all factors for heart disease.  The death rate was twice as high for lean diabetics than for their obese peers.  Normally, heart disease is linked to obesity, which is causing some head scratching among the researchers, although this “Obesity Paradox” has been seen in other diseases.

It appears that there may be something about being obese that protects the heart or it could be that those who are of normal weight and develop diabetes have other things going on that causes their higher mortality.  The findings apply to a growing segment of the population and will make it more confusing for doctors who are treating the lean diabetes patient.  Controlling blood sugar and exercising will still be key for controlling diabetes but losing weight may not be as important.  The next step in studies like this may shed more light on how to handle the “Obesity Paradox” as some researchers have dubbed it.  Doctors will want to watch normal weight people who contract diabetes more carefully as they are at a higher risk of death, but what should they tell them that they haven’t already been telling diabetic patients?  If you have diabetes, you’ll want to follow this study and others like it carefully, along with all the other monitoring of blood sugar, cholesterol, and weight that you are already tracking.

Written by www.labtestingnow.com