More than half of men (55%) and two thirds (65%) of women currently aged 20 years in India will likely develop diabetes in their life time, with most of those cases (around 95%) likely to be T2DM, according to research by an international team from India, the UK and the US, led by Dr Shammi Luhar, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, UK.

Young children of African ancestry are more at risk of developing obesity if they possess a genetic variant that reduces their ability to produce the hormone leptin, according to a study, ‘Genetic Studies of Leptin Concentrations Implicate Leptin in the Regulation of Early Adiposity’, published in the journal Diabetes. Interestingly, adults with the variant do not have the same risk, suggesting that leptin plays a role in the development of obesity at a young age but the obesity does not continue into adulthood.

Researchers studying a group of UK healthcare workers discovered that non-white individuals recovering from COVID-19 displayed higher antibody levels than white individuals, with significantly greater levels observed in Asian individuals.

Patients with obesity who are over the age of 60 can lose an equivalent amount of weight as younger people using only lifestyle changes, according to a study from the University of Warwick and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust, demonstrating that age is no barrier to losing weight.