Diabetes and Composition of Weight Lifting and Cardio in Exercise

The prevalence of type-2 diabetes(T2D) has increased globally. This has led to greater mortality, morbidity and disability in the general population. It is thus crucial to identify methods to prevent its onset among the healthy, and to also discover solutions to adequately manage the complications among those affected. Most research in this area has focused on the role of diet and exercise. More recently, different exercise types and their relationship with T2D has received considerable attention. In our work, we investigate the association between T2D (primary outcome) and two types of exercises: cardio (CR) and weight lifting (WL). Specifically, the relationship between duration of time spent in the two exercises and the odds of T2D is explored. Data are obtained from the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey, USA. Three ethnic populations are considered: White American, Black American and Hispanic American. Both WL and CR are found to be associated with negative log-odds of diabetes across all three ethnicities (WL: p<0.0001 and CR: p=0.00431). The association between WL and T2D is found to be modified for females (interaction-term coefficient: -0.096 (p=0.0115)).