A recent study published in the Diabetes, Metabolism and Obesity journal highlights the age- and sex-specific interventions for diabetes prevention. Demographic characteristics suggest variation in the priorities of public health interventions.
The study aimed to examine the associations between diabetes-related lifestyle and metabolic risk factors in middle-aged and older adults, when adjusted for age and gender.
Researchers constructed sex- and age-specific sub-cohorts at ages 45, 55, and 65 years using data from the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study. They considered five lifestyle factors (sleep duration, alcohol consumption, cumulative smoking, physical activity, and dietary diversity score) and five metabolic factors (waist circumference [WC], mean arterial pressure, triglycerides [TG], high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and alanine aminotransferase) as diabetes-related risk factors. For each sex- and age-specific subcohort, the association between these factors and incident diabetes was estimated. To evaluate the significnace of individual risk factors and their joint association, researchers used hierarchical Bayesian Kernel Machine Regression analysis.
Results showed that, across all groups, metabolic factors—especially WC and TG—were more strongly associated with the development of diabetes than lifestyle factors. In women, diabetes development was related to cumulative smoking and alcohol consumption; however, this lifestyle association was not observed in men. The estimated combined association of the 10 risk factors with incident diabetes ranged from 0.39 to 0.46 in men and from 0.26 to 0.45 in women. Older women showed a weaker association between these factors and the incidence of diabetes. Additionally, there was age- and sex-dependent variation in individual risk factors.