Skiing as leisure activity may reduce future risk of diabetes

Delhi: Cross‐country skiing is undertaken as a leisure activity has the potential to promote public health. It is associated with a reduction in risk of adverse vascular outcomes, but its association with type 2 diabetes is not established. The researchers conducted a study to assess the associations between leisure‐time cross‐country skiing habits and incident type 2 diabetes.

Exercise has always been shown to be beneficial for the prevention and control of various diseases. Substantiating the same, a recent study in the journal Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews has found that people indulging in cross‐country skiing more frequently and for a longer duration are at a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to people who did not participate in the sport.

Cardiovascular complications are known to the leading cause of morbidity and death in patients with type 2 diabetes. Physical activity is well established to have important health benefits including the prevention of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Knowledge of the relationships between specific physical activity types and major chronic diseases could provide insight into whether a particular physical activity type has more benefits compared with others and also whether harm could occur by performing too much of a particular physical activity type.

Setor K. Kunutsor, Bristol Medical School at the University of Bristol in the U.K, and colleagues aimed to assess the associations between leisure‐time cross‐country skiing habits and incident type 2 diabetes.

For the purpose, the researchers analyzed data of 2483 middle‐aged men with no history of diabetes at baseline in the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease prospective study. Using a 12‐month physical activity questionnaire, they assessed the frequency, average duration, and intensity of leisure cross‐country skiing.

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Key findings of the study include:

• During a median follow‐up of 21.6 years, 539 men developed type 2 diabetes.


• Type 2 diabetes risk decreased with an increasing total volume of cross‐country skiing up to 1,215 metabolic equivalent task (MET) hours/year.


• In analyses adjusted for several established risk factors, when compared with men with no cross‐country skiing activity, the HRs for type 2 diabetes were 0.75 and 0.59 for men who did 1‐200 and >200 MET hours/year of cross‐country skiing, respectively.


• Compared with men with no cross‐country skiing activity, the corresponding adjusted HRs for type 2 diabetes were 0.73 and 0.64 for men who did 1‐60 and >60 minutes/week of cross‐country skiing, respectively.


• The associations remained consistent following further adjustment for prevalent comorbidities.

"Our findings suggest that total volume and duration of leisure time cross‐country skiing are each inversely and independently associated with future risk of type 2 diabetes in a middle‐aged Caucasian male population," wrote the authors.

"The results should be interpreted with caution given the observational design, the inability to generalize the findings to women and other populations, and potential misclassification of the main exposure and physical activity habits," they concluded.

The study, "Leisure‐time cross‐country skiing is associated with lower incidence of type 2 diabetes: A prospective cohort study," is published in the journal Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/dmrr.3216