Diabetes rate soars in Chinese-Canadians: study

Chinese-Canadians may be at a higher risk of being diagnosed with diabetes even with their lower rates of obesity, according to a new study released Thursday.

Researchers from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in the Canadian city of Toronto found that the incidence of diabetes increased 15-fold between 1996 and 2005 among Canadians of Chinese origin, while it only went up 24 percent in European-Canadians.

Published in the American journal Diabetes Care on Thursday, the study was conducted to explore a change they were noticing in the Chinese-Canadian population, the study's co-author Dr. Baiju Shah said in a phone interview. The findings were surprising, he said, mainly because they weren't traditionally seen to be particularly vulnerable to the disease.

"Historically, most of the data in Canada and elsewhere suggested that Chinese-Canadians don't have a particularly increased rate of diabetes," he said.

Shah and his team analyzed the health surveys carried out by Statistics Canada between 1996-2005, and also used information gathered from people who identified themselves as either being of Chinese or European origin, those who were living in Ontario and didn't have diabetes at the time. The team tracked those 77,000 people over a five-year period.

The results revealed only a slight bump in cases of diabetes in European-Canadians over time. But the same couldn't be said for Chinese-Canadians. "It grew really rapidly," Shah said about the Chinese population.

The incidence of diabetes in Chinese-Canadians grew from 1.3 cases per 1,000 people to 19.6 over a nine-year period.

Some of that could be attributed to the increasingly unhealthy lifestyle Chinese-Canadians have taken up, Shah suspected. For one, the large migration of Chinese-Canadians into the suburbs have resulted in a more sedentary lifestyle.

"When the main Chinatown was downtown, that's a very urban area you can walk... you walked to the stores, walked to the parks, everything is close by," said Shah. "Now that much of the Chinese community has moved to the suburbs, they're much more car- dependent communities where you have to go into the car just to go get a pint of milk."

But the less active lifestyle and the change to a highly processed North American diet is only part of the problem. While obesity rates rose from 20 to 25 percent in Chinese-Canadians over the study period, their European counterparts have also seen a similar increase, going up from 50 to 55 percent.

"It doesn't explain the whole story because the Europeans had a much higher rate of obesity to begin with, and a similar increase over time, so there must be other factors at play," he stressed.

A theory that could explain this spike is that certain ethnic groups and cultures are more susceptible to complications and problems associated with weight gain when compared to Europeans, Shah suggested.

The argument is that people from countries like China, India and Africa, places where food was scarcer would pack on the energy and nutrients whenever they had access to food, he said. Europeans, on the other hand, didn't have the same extent of food insecurity, and so those metabolic traits didn't develop to the same degree.

While Canadians of South Asian, Aboriginal, or African origin have traditionally been seen as the groups most susceptible to diabetes, the soaring numbers in the Chinese community suggests that targeted prevention strategies are necessary, said Shah.

"Once you get diabetes you've got it, there's no way to cure it, " he said. "We need to be more aggressive about screening for diabetes in Chinese-Canadians, and think more about diabetes prevention programs and weight maintenance, healthy lifestyle and behavior change programs."