Abstract:

The incidence of diabetes is increasing rapidly in recent years. The global incidence of diabetes was 8.3% in 2013 and the number of Chinese patients with diabetes is the largest in the world, about 140 millions. At the same time, there are about 1 billion smokers worldwide and more than half of Chinese males are smokers. Although most population-based studies show that smoking increases the risk of diabetes, some studies indicate that smoking is irrelevant to the incidence of diabetes or decreases the risk of diabetes. The mechanism may be that smoking can reduce the body mass, so as to decrease the risk of diabetes. The effects of smoking on sugar elevating hormones and insulin resistance are not clear yet. This paper discusses the effects of smoking on the incidence of diabetes from the perspectives of population-based studies and pathophysiological mechanisms.

Key words: cigarette smoking, diabetes mellitus, epidemiology, mechanism