Men with heavier wives more prone to develop diabetes, research states

Research presented at this year’s European Association of the Study of Diabetes conference in Portugal suggests middle-aged men with overweight or obese wives are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes—but the opposite doesn’t appear to be true for women with heavier husbands.

Danish doctor Daniel R. Witte, MD, PhD, led a research team in two studies on the topic, Medscape reported. Witte and colleagues discovered men in their 50s and 60s with heavier wives were also likely to be heavier than their peers with slimmer spouses.

While wives’ body mass indexes (BMI) might be an important factor in their husbands’ health risks—a wife with a BMI of 30 versus a wife with a BMI of 25 increased a husband’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 33 percent, the study concluded—the husband’s BMI is still the most important factor in determining his own risk of developing diabetes.

One spokesperson at the Portugal meeting said these findings could be a result of typical home life in the late 1990s, when women were still “more responsible for or the ones who determined the diet of the family or the household,” Medscape wrote.

In addition to checking for regular risk factors like poor diet, not enough exercise and genetic predisposition to diabetes, Witte and co-authors suggest a closer look into a patient’s personal social relationships could be revealing of health risks.

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