New opportunities for fight against diabetes as a result of new study by the UMCG on the Healthy Ageing Campus. People with lower education levels and a healthy diet, appear to have twice as much diabetes risk than people with higher education levels. This conclusion was drawn by scientists of the UMCG after analysis of the data of over 90.000 Dutchmen. The published their results last week in EClinical Medicine, published by the Lancet. 

Researcher Petra Vinke and her colleagues of the departments kidney diseases and epidemiology studied with the help of data from the Lifelines biobank the relation between diet and the diabetes risk. They analysed whether this relation was influenced by socio-economic status (SES), focused on educational level.

Combination of causes

As expected, in the study a lower risk for diabetes was found with participants who eat more healthy, both people with lower education levels as people with higher education levels. Also, on average a less healthy diet and a higher diabetes risk was found with people with lower SES. It was striking that the diabetes risk among people with lower SES was twice as high than with people with a higher SES, even with a healthy diet in both groups.

This lead the researchers to the conclusion that diabetes is caused more often by a combination of factors with people of low SES. And that the common approach at the GP's, that is the improvement of the dietary pattern, is much more effective with highly educated people than people with lower education levels. An approach that only focuses on improving dietary patterns will therefore not reduce the large differences in the percentage of people with diabetes between socio-economic groups. Better insight into the role of additional risk factors of socio-economic health differences is needed to reach a prevention strategy that is helpful in all layers of society.

Diabetes

Almost 1.2 million Dutch have  diabetes, of whom over 90% type 2 diabetes (that's about 1.1 million Dutch, in other words 1 in every 15 Dutch).  Diabetes is found about twice as much with people with low SES than people with higher SES. It is common knowledge that besides ageing and heredity factors such as little physical activity, excess weight, unhealthy diet and smoking increase the risk at diabetes type 2. 

Source article: umcg.nl
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