Type 2 diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is one of the world’s most common metabolic diseases. Affecting almost 500 million people worldwide, the condition occurs when the body develops a resistance to insulin, and the secretion of insulin by pancreatic beta-cells becomes defective.
This means the body struggles to regulate and maintain normal blood sugar levels, causing high blood sugar, which results in severe damage to the cardiovascular system, eyes, kidneys, and nerves.
The prevalence of diabetes is expected to continue to rise as diets begin to include more and more ultraprocessed foods, fewer people are physically active, and the global population ages. By 2050, an estimated 1.3 billion people will have diabetes.
Although it is well understood that type 2 diabetes often occurs together with other chronic conditions, including high blood pressure, heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and depression, it is not known how fast diabetes patients develop these other chronic diseases or how the progression varies by age.
Researchers at the Steno Diabetes Center in Aarhus, Denmark, therefore set out to explore how type 2 diabetes influences the rate of chronic disease development. Their research was presented at this year’s annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), which took place in Vienna, Austria, from 15-19 September.
For their study, which will be published in early 2026, the researchers looked at data from 502,368 participants of the UK Biobank and analyzed the health records to track how participants’ health developed over a period of 15 years. During that time, 47,725 (9.5%) participants were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Among 80 long-term chronic conditions, such as heart disease and kidney disease, the researchers then looked at which diseases the type 2 diabetes patients subsequently developed.
The researchers then calculated the rate of chronic disease development. For instance, the researchers looked at how long it took a person with type 2 diabetes and one other chronic condition to develop a third condition, compared to a person without diabetes but with two other chronic conditions to develop another chronic condition.
The researchers found that a person with type 2 diabetes and one other chronic condition developed a third condition at a rate of 5.7% per year, while someone without diabetes but with two other conditions developed a third with a rate of 3.5% per year. This, say the researchers, means that people with type 2 diabetes have a 67% higher risk of developing a new disease compared to people without diabetes.
“Concerningly, people with type 2 diabetes showed faster progression to diseased states compared to those without the condition,” explained lead author of the study, Jie Zhang, PhD, of the Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus.
“This acceleration was observed across all age groups, with the pattern being more pronounced in middle-aged adults. Our results highlight type 2 diabetes as a key factor in multimorbidity and underscore the need for stage-specific care strategies tailored to different phases of chronic disease development.”
Moreover, the researchers discovered that younger people with type 2 diabetes (aged 40-55 years) showed a faster rate of acquiring other diseases than older people with type 2 diabetes.
“This finding underscores the need for early intervention in midlife to slow multimorbidity progression,” said Zhang. “The reasons why participants with T2D in the younger age groups appear to progress more quickly requires further research.”
