Does a rise in BMI cause an increased risk of diabetes?: evidence from India
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Overnutrition increases the risk of diabetes. Evidence on the causal impact of overnutrition on diabetes is scarce for India. Considering a representative sample from India, this study examines the causal effect of a rise in the Body Mass Index (BMI) of an individual on the likelihood of being diabetic while addressing the issue of unobserved endogeneity between overnutrition and diabetes. METHODS: The study considers individual level data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of India, namely, National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for the year 2015-16. The NFHS is a large-scale, multi-round survey conducted in a representative sample of households throughout India. The survey covers females having age 15-49 years and males having age 15-54 years. The instrument variable approach is used to address the potential endogeneity in the relationship between BMI and diabetes. We instrument BMI of an individual by BMI of a non-biologically related household member. Ordered Probit, Probit and IV-Probit models are estimated using two alternative definitions for measuring diabetes-self-reported diabetes status and blood glucose levels (ordinal measure). RESULTS: The coefficients obtained from the Ordered Probit and Probit models are much smaller than those estimated by an IV-Probit model. The latter estimates the causal impact of a rise in BMI on diabetes by taking into account the effect of the unobserved genetic and other related factors. The likelihood of being diabetic is twice or more among the overweight and obese individuals as compared to non-overweight individuals in all the specifications. With a unit increase in BMI the probability of being diabetic increases by about 1.5% among overweight and obese individuals and by 0.5% among the non-overweight individuals in the IV-Probit model. Similar results from the Ordered Probit model show that on average, the overweight and obese individuals experience about 0.2% increase in the probability of being diabetic and about 0.4% increase in the probability of being prediabetic. CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrates that the likelihood of being both prediabetic and diabetic is higher among the overweight and obese individuals as compared to the non-overweight individuals. We also find that the level of risk of being prediabetic or diabetic differs across gender, wealth quintiles and regions and the effects are more severe among population in the urban areas, belonging to the richest wealth quintile and men. Our findings have significant implications for the policy formulation as diabetes has a substantial health and economic burden associated with it. Future studies may investigate the effect of abdominal obesity on diabetes.
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Some factors are also related to obesity comorbidities such as fatty liver diseases and type 2 diabetes.
“Some are also related to obesity comorbidities such as fatty liver diseases [6] and type 2 diabetes [7,8].”
From Identification of factors associated with sarcopenic obesity development: Literature review and expert panel voting (2024) · cites this paper as [7]
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- Authors
- Gupta, S., & Bansal, S.
- Affiliations
- Jawaharlal Nehru University (IN)
- Corresponding author
- Bansal, Sangeeta
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2020-04-01
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- e0229716
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7112218
- OpenAlex
- W3014717156
- Cited by
- 57
- References
- 43
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 6.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- correction (2021-02-19)
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Jawaharlal Nehru University
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Obesity, Physical Activity, Diet
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism › Diabetes, Cardiovascular Risks, and Lipoproteins
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Epidemiology › Adipokines, Inflammation, and Metabolic Diseases
- Keywords
- body mass index, diabetes mellitus, obesity, overweight, prediabetes, overnutrition, endogeneity, blood glucose, gender differences, wealth inequality, urban-rural differences, India
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Female, Health Surveys, Humans, India, Male, Middle Aged, Obesity, Prediabetic State, Risk Factors, Body Mass Index, Young Adult
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