Early exposure to tobacco tied to developing diabetes
Exposure to tobacco smoke in the womb or picking up the cigarette habit in childhood or adolescence greatly increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in adulthood, a new study finds.
The preliminary research, which included more than 400,000 adults in the UK Biobank, was presented Wednesday at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention | Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Scientific Sessions 2024 in Chicago.
Participants who had a genetic predisposition to type 2 diabetes and started smoking in childhood or adolescence had the highest risk of developing the illness.
Tobacco exposure in adulthood is a well-established risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Previous research has uncovered that cigarette smokers are 30 percent to 40 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than nonsmokers.
“The findings emphasize the importance of preventing tobacco exposures in early life stages, including during pregnancy, especially for people with high genetic risk for type 2 diabetes,” senior author Victor Wenze Zhong, a professor and department chair of epidemiology and biostatistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China, told UPI via email.
“Earlier smoking initiation is associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes compared with never smoking. Adopting a healthy lifestyle later in adulthood could lower risk of type 2 diabetes among people who have tobacco exposure in utero, childhood or adolescence,” said Zhong, who earned a doctorate in nutritional epidemiology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
In this study, researchers examined data for 433,874 adults in the UK Biobank — a large biomedical database and research resource with health records of about 500,000 adults enrolled from 2006 to 2010. These adults live in the United Kingdom and obtained health care through the country’s National Health Service.
The researchers estimated the associations of tobacco exposure before birth and initiation of smoking during childhood (ages 5 to 14) or adolescence (ages 15 to 17) with the development of type 2 diabetes.
They also explored whether following a healthy lifestyle as an adult, such as eating a nutritious diet, exercising, getting sufficient sleep, maintaining normal weight and not smoking may have affected high-risk individuals’ development of type 2 diabetes.
The analysis found that tobacco exposure before birth was associated with a 20 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes compared to individuals who never smoked.
People who began smoking in childhood had a 118 percent risk of type 2 diabetes; those who started smoking as adolescents had a 57 percent higher risk; and those who started smoking as adults had a 34 percent greater risk compared to those who never smoked.
Compared with people who had no early-life tobacco exposure and a low genetic predisposition for type 2 diabetes, participants with a high genetic risk score had a 302 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes if they were also exposed to tobacco before birth, a 593 percent higher risk if they began smoking in childhood and a 404 percent higher risk if they took up the habit in adolescence.