Type 2 diabetes is strongly associated with obesity, but the mortality risk related to elevated body weight in people with type 2 diabetes compared with people without diabetes has not been established.
We prospectively assessed short- and long-term mortality in people with type 2 diabetes with a recorded diabetes duration =5 years identified from the Swedish National Diabetes Register (NDR) between 1998 and 2012 and five age- and sex-matched control subjects per study participant from the general population.
Over a median follow-up of 5.5 years, there were 17,546 deaths among 149,345 patients with type 2 diabetes (mean age 59.6 years [40% women]) and 68,429 deaths among 743,907 matched control subjects. Short-term all-cause mortality risk (=5 years) displayed a U-shaped relationship with BMI, with hazard ratios (HRs) ranging from 0.81 (95% CI 0.75-0.88) among patients with diabetes and BMI 30 to