Content area
Full text
About the Authors:
Ronald C. W. Ma
* E-mail: [email protected] (RCWM); [email protected] (BMP)
Affiliations Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Prince of Wales Hospital, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Institute of Diabetes and Obesity, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1227-803X
Barry M. Popkin
* E-mail: [email protected] (RCWM); [email protected] (BMP)
Affiliation: Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9495-9324Citation: Ma RCW, Popkin BM (2017) Intergenerational diabetes and obesity-A cycle to break? PLoS Med14(10): e1002415. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002415
Published: October 31, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Ma, Popkin. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: RCWM acknowledges support from the Research Grants Council Theme-based Research Scheme (T12-402/13N), RGC General Research Fund (14110415), and the Health and Medical Research Fund from the Food and Health Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (13140761). BMP acknowledges support from NIH R01DK108148, NIH P2C HD050924, NIH R01DK098072, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: RCWM and BMP are both members of the Editorial Board of PLOS Medicine.
Abbreviations: BMI, body mass index; GDM, gestational diabetes mellitus; NCD, noncommunicable disease; SSB, sugar-sweetened beverage
Provenance: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.
The diabetes apocalypse?
Globally, efforts to prevent diabetes and obesity have attained mixed success.
Although prevalence of adult-onset diabetes is declining in some countries, the prevalence of childhood obesity and young-onset diabetes, with risk of associated complications, continues to increase in many high- and lower-income countries [1]. More than 1. 9 billion children and adults are overweight and obese, and prevalence is rapidly rising, with the greatest increase found among children [2][3,4].
Ongoing efforts to promote lifestyle intervention have had limited impact on the obesity and diabetes epidemic because of several critical factors. One factor comprises early life effects, a new field...