These findings
are consistent with some earlier findings conducted in Western
populations. Excessive weight has been observed to have the
greatest impact on the risk of NOD in middle-aged British men[13]
and the incidence of diabetes has been observed to increase with
the degree of overweight in both men and women[14]. It appears
that overweight and obesity, particularly of long duration, increases
the development of type-2 diabetes and is the single most important predictor of new diabetes in Western populations[3,15,16].In
Eastern populations, excessive body weight was found to be an
independent and dose-dependent risk factor for type-2 diabetes in
Japanese [17]