Named as one of the main reasons of diabetes

The scientists combined the results of observations for the health of diabetics and healthy people.

The rapid growth in the number of diabetics worldwide may be associated not only with obesity epidemic, but also air pollution, doctors say in an article published in the Lancet Planetary Health.

“Our study shows that the relationship between air pollution and incidence of diabetes in all countries of the world. The number of diabetics starts to grow even with minimal levels of air pollution that is considered acceptable by the who. All this indicates that these standards need to change,” said Ziad al-Ali (Ziyad Al-Ali) at the University of Washington in St. Louis (USA).
According to official statistics, today, about 3.7 million Russians suffer from diabetes. Experts from the International diabetes Federation suggest that the number may exceed 12.7 million. In the United States, the number of diabetics exceeds 30 million, and in the world – 420 million people.

Recently, Chinese doctors decided to evaluate both the prevalence of diabetes affects the life expectancy of the Chinese, and came to the conclusion that the acquisition of this disease shortens a typical life span of nine years, and their American colleagues found that diabetes is associated with approximately 12% of deaths in the United States.

As noted by al-Ali and his colleagues, today the majority of doctors believes that the number of diabetics is beginning to grow rapidly in the world due to the development of the obesity epidemic that has engulfed not only developed but also many developing countries, including China itself.

On the other hand, as noted already, the scientists themselves, of the epidemic of diabetes occurred in those countries where there are no problems with obesity – for example, in Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea or some African countries. Trying to understand what it can be connected, the researchers analyzed all the possible differences between States with large and small number of diabetics.

By analyzing this data, physicians have noticed that all the countries covered by the “epidemic” of diabetes, were United by one problem – the high level of air pollution. To find this dependence, al-Ali and his colleagues tried to assess how many people got diabetes because of emissions of cars and industrial emissions.

For this, the scientists combined the results of observations for the health of diabetics and healthy people in the United States and some other countries, and put these data into maps of air pollution, prepared by the NASA satellites and ground-based meteorological stations.

As shown by these calculations, the risk to get diabetes begins to increase even at relatively low concentrations of aerosols and harmful substances in the air, more than 2.4 micrograms per cubic meter. For example, people living in the pollution of 10 micrograms per cubic meter, 21% more likely to suffer from diabetes than the inhabitants of more prosperous regions.

In General, the poisoning of the air, according to doctors, every year increases the number of diabetics on 3.2 million, or approximately 14% of the total number of such diagnoses. In the future, if the volume of industrial and automotive emissions will continue to grow, the contribution of air pollution to the development of the epidemic of diabetes will continue to grow.

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