Women who are ‘pear shaped’ like Beyonce, J-Lo and Kimberly Walsh are ‘less likely to get diabetes’
WOMEN who are "pear shaped" like Beyonce, J-Lo and Kimberly Walsh are less likely to develop diabetes, experts have revealed.
A person's body shape can predict if they will fall victim to type 2 diabetes, as well as heart disease, new findings suggest.
It's long been known that being obese is a risk factor for both conditions.
But it's where you pile on the pounds, not just how fat you are, that may determine if you'll be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a scientists said.
Having an "apple-shaped" figure - carrying a spare tyre around your tummy - increases the risk, scientists found.
Experts from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in the US found that having a genetic predisposition to "abdominal adiposity" - or an apple-shaped body - was linked with a higher risk for type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.
Their study, published in the journal JAMA, examined the pattern of gene variants associated to this body shape.
People who are "apple shaped" tend to gain weight around their tummy, rather than their hips and thighs.
Examining data from a past study, researchers pinpointed 48 gene variations that were linked to a person's waist-to-hip ratio.
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These were adjusted to take into account body mass index, a known measure of abdominal adiposty, to develop a genetic risk score.
This risk score was then used and applied to six previous studies involving more than 400,000 people.
They found that having a genetic predisposition to abdominal adiposity is linked to significant increases in the incidence of type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease, along with increases in blood lipids, blood glucose and systolic blood pressure.
Senior report author Dr Sekar Kathiresan, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the MGH Centre for Genomic Medicine, said: "People vary in their distribution of body fat - some put fat in their belly, which we call abdominal adiposity, and some in their hips and thighs.
"Abdominal adiposity has been correlated with cardiometabolic disease, but whether it actually has a role in causing those conditions was unknown.
"We tested whether genetic predisposition to abdominal adiposity was associated with the risk for type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease and found that the answer was a firm 'yes'."
Study lead author Connor Emdin of the MGH Centre for Genomic Medicine, added: "The lack of association between the body type genetic risk score and confounding factors such as diet and smoking provides strong evidence that abdominal adiposity itself contributes to causing type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
"Not only do these results allow us to use body shape as a marker for increased cardiometabolic risk, they also suggest that developing drugs that modify fat distribution may help prevent these diseases.
"Future research also could identify individual genes that could be targeted to improve body fat distribution to reduce these risks."
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