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Smoking increases the risk of type 2 or adult-onset diabetes, say researchers. Smoke gets in your pancreas. That's the message – well kind of – from a review of research into whether there's a link between smoking and type 2 or adult onset diabetes. That's the one that everyone's fretting about. It's been suspected that smoking increases the risk of diabetes but the evidence has been inconclusive. So researchers combined the best available information from 25 studies which followed the health of 1.2 million people for several years. There was a consistent finding of an increased risk with smoking of about 50 per cent and it was made even more plausible by the fact that the more a person smoked the higher the risk and vice versa. Also smoking preceded the diabetes. So is this cause and effect or is it that smokers generally live badly making them sitting ducks for diabetes? Most studies adjusted their statistics for lifestyle but that's hard to do completely. On the other hand there is evidence that smoking is bad for the pancreas, causes internal inflammation and increases abdominal fat – even in thin smokers, which could hamper the work of the sugar hormone insulin. Whatever the story, it's another example of how, directly or indirectly, smoking is far from sweet.
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