Saturday, July 9, 2011

Being an India a risk factor for diabetes

Regardless of where you live, in India or in the United States, you have the highest chances of getting diabetes, if you were born an Indian, said Padma Shri and Dr B C Roy National Awardee Dr K K Aggarwal President Heart Care Foundation of India.
The same is also true for heart disease. The CADI study has already shown earlier that Indians settled in US are 17 times more likely to get a heart attack than the US natives.
And now a new study published in the June 29 in the journal Diabetes Care has shown that people who immigrated to the United States from India have the highest rate of type 2 diabetes. The study by Leena Gupta and colleagues analyzed data provided by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene of 54,000 people and concluded that 13.6 percent of South Asians born outside of the US had diabetes. In the study, South Asians who were born abroad and had normal body mass index (18.5 to 25) had a rate of diabetes 2.5 times as high as other foreign-born Asians and a five times increased rate than that among US-born non-Hispanic whites.
When the authors adopted WHO BMI categories tailored for specific regions and races to define who was overweight and obese, foreign-born South Asians had a higher rate of diabetes at lower BMI levels than all other racial and ethnic groups.
The study also showed that people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan have the highest rate of diabetes of any ethnic group in New York. It is nearly double that of other foreign-born Asians. Hence, it is important for South Asians to be screened for diabetes, regardless of their body weight.
Diabetes has been increasing in India over the last few decades because of consumption of more calories, not exercising regularly and a shift of diet from high complex carbohydrates to high refined carbohydrates.

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