According to the latest findings from a landmark San Antonio-led study, diabetes seems to be deadlier for Mexican Americans than for Anglos, and much deadlier for diabetes patients living in Mexico....
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The San Antonio Heart Study, which followed the health of thousands of residents over three decades, was among the first large studies to show that Mexican Americans were at higher risk of developing diabetes.
With the latest paper, researchers looked at people who died over the course of the study, as well as those who died in the Mexico City Diabetes Study -- an offshoot that included both Mexican and San Antonio researchers.
They found that while Anglo diabetics had double the risk of nondiabetics of dying, Mexican Americans had three times the risk. And diabetics living in Mexico City were four times more likely to die.
Kelly Hunt, associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston said, "Although the prevalence of diabetes is so much higher in Mexican Americans than in non-Hispanic whites, it wouldn't be all that surprising to me that if the severity of the disease was somehow worse. But it's hard to measure that."
Hunt said there might be genetic differences that might make for a more aggressive disease in Hispanics than in Anglos. But that also wouldn't explain the higher risk of death in Mexican residents compared to San Antonio Hispanics.
Dr. Roberto Treviño, a diabetes researcher and director of the Social and Health Research Center in San Antonio, who wasn't involved with the study, was skeptical of the findings. He pointed to a 1999 paper from the San Antonio Heart Study that showed that living in a poor neighborhood also is a major predictor of diabetes.
"Because living in socially deprived neighborhoods is a powerful predictor, it did not surprise me that the mortality from diabetes would be highest among Mexico City residents, Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites, in that order," Treviño said. "I would argue that the cause of this health disparity is not genetic but environmental."
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