An Association of Diabetes Mellitus Type II and Alcohol Consumption for adults in the United States

Amy Larson
Advisor: R. Leonard Vance, PhD, CIH
Preceptor: Joyce F. Hurt, PhD

Background According to estimates presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2005, 20.8 million Americans (7.0% of the U.S. population) had diabetes.  In addition, diabetes was determined to be the sixth leading cause of death in the United States in 2002.  There is no question that diabetes mellitus is a major public health concern in the United States as well as around the world.  It has been estimated that the prevalence of diabetes worldwide, for all age-groups, will increase from 171 million people in 2000 to 366 million in 2030 (2).  Also of importance from a public health perspective, the costs associated with diabetes care were estimated to be $85.7 billion in 1992 (3) and $98 billion in 1997 (4).
           
Objective The purpose of this study is to further investigate the findings on alcohol consumption and the development of diabetes mellitus.

Methods For this cross-sectional study, a data set of 356,112 records from the 2005 BRFSS (Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System), a random-digit phone survey of adult United States Residents was collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data were collected from persons 18 years or older living in U.S. households (one per household) in 2005.
SPSS v. 15.0 was used to transfer the information from the original CDC data file in ASCII format to SPSS for analysis.  Logistic regression was used to determine the presence of an interaction among the dependent variable and the independent variables.

Results  The adjusted risk for alcohol users found in this study was 0.64.  This reflects that alcohol use had a protective effect leading to about 36% decreased risk of diabetes in persons consuming small amounts of alcohol on a regular basis.

Conclusion  Light-to-moderate alcohol intake may be beneficial with regard to diabetes mellitus.  Persons having one drink per day could reduce their risk of developing diabetes up to 40%.  Caution should be taken pending further research on long-term effects of alcohol consumption and diabetes.  In addition, weaknesses in existing studies should be taken into consideration.