Study finds strong link between diabetes and air pollution

WASHINGTON - A new study has found a strong, consistent correlation between adult diabetes and particulate air pollution that persists after adjustment for other risk factors like obesity and ethnicity.

Researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston conducted the national epidemiologic study, which is among the first large-scale population-based studies to link diabetes prevalence with air pollution.

“We wanted to do everything possible to reduce confounding and ensure the validity of our findings,” said John Pearson, the study’s first author.

In all analyses, there was a strong and consistent association between diabetes prevalence and PM2.5 (fine particulates of 0.1-2.5 nanometers in size) concentrations.

This finding was seen in both 2004 and 2005, and remained consistent and significant when differing estimates of PM2.5 exposure were used.

“We didn’t have data on individual exposure, so we can’t prove causality, and we can’t know exactly the mechanism of these peoples’ diabetes. But pollution came across as a significant predictor in all our models,” said John Brownstein, of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program.

Based on their findings, the researchers call for more study of environmental factors in diabetes, including basic research on the inflammatory mechanisms in diabetes and the role of PM2.5.

The report is published in the October issue of Diabetes Care. (ANI)