Obesity and diabetes

Hello, my name is Naveed Sattar. I’m Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow. I’m here today to talk about obesity and its links to type 2 diabetes pathogenesis and its cardiovascular outcomes. So the outline I thought I would follow is really a talk in two parts. The first part is to explain how diabetes, through ectopic fat and excess fuel, links to cardiovascular and cardiorenal risks – and also how it actually links to the development of hyperglycaemia per se. Then, in part two, to explain why that excess weight is actually more pronounced in younger people with type 2, which partly explains their higher life years lost due to diabetes. But also, on the opposite side of the equation, how non-white ethnicity – so really, everybody who’s not white – actually has to put on less weight to develop diabetes. That will then explain why people of certain ethnicities develop diabetes sooner but, on the other hand, it may also explain why those ethnicities lose fewer life years due to diabetes.