Waistline test for diabetes

Last updated at 10:00 15 April 2005


People with a waistline of a metre or more are at a high risk of getting diabetes and heart disease, according to new research.

Swedish scientists found that waist circumference could be used as a simple tool to predict who was at serious risk of insulin resistance - an early stage in the development of the health problems.

Those people would benefit most from lifestyle changes.

Until now there was no easy test for the likeliness of insulin resistance, and the researchers said there were questions over the accuracy of guidelines suggesting a cut-off for heart disease of 102cm in men and 88cm in women.

The team at Karolinska University Hospital, in Stockholm, set out to assess the ability of different body measurements and biological markers to predict insulin sensitivity, measuring height, weight, waist and hip circumference.

They studied 2,746 healthy male and female volunteers aged 18 to 72 with waist circumferences between 65cm and 150cm.

The results, published in the British Medical Journal, showed that the waistline was a "very strong independent predictor" of insulin sensitivity.

A waist circumference of less than a metre excluded insulin resistance in both sexes, the researchers found.

They said it replaced body mass index, waist to hip ratio, and other measures of total body fat as a predictor of insulin resistance.

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