You have diabetes? Take care of your significant other!

research team from the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) has shown, through combined analyses of several studies, evidence that spousal diabetes is a diabetes risk factor. These findings, published today in the open access journal BMC Medicine, have important clinical implications since they can help improve diabetes detection and motivate couples to work together to reduce the risk of developing the condition.

“We found a 26% increase in the risk of developing type 2 diabetes if your spouse also has type 2 diabetes,” says senior author of the study, Dr. Kaberi Dasgupta, researcher at the Research Institute of the MUHC and an associate professor of medicine at McGill University. “This may be a platform to assist clinicians to develop strategies to involve both partners. Changing health behaviour is challenging and if you have the collaboration of your partner it’s likely to be easier.”
Dr. Dasgupta’s team, located at the Division of Clinical Epidemiology of the MUHC, wanted to see if diabetes in one partner could lead to diabetes in the other partner because many of the risk behaviours that lead to diabetes, such as poor eating habits and low physical activity, could be shared within a household.
Researchers analyzed results from six selected studies that were conducted in different parts of the world and looked at key outcomes such as age, socioeconomic status and the way in which diabetes was diagnosed in 75,498 couples.

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