Diabetes may shorten life span

In a New York Times article, the diabetes and obesity epidemic will threaten the upward trend in life expectancy.

Some worry, for example, that today’s fat children will grow up to be tomorrow’s heart disease and diabetes patients, destroying the nation’s gains in health and well-being.

“It is very legitimate to be concerned about levels of overweight and obesity in kids,” said David Williamson, a senior biomedical research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But at the same time, those levels of obesity are overlaid on improvements in health in children, which also affect long-term health and longevity.”

S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, predicted in The New England Journal of Medicine that obesity would lead to so much diabetes and heart disease that life expectancy would “level off or even decline within the first half of this century.”