According to a new study, stress during adolescence is linked to the likelihood of suffering with Type 2 diabetes in adulthood.

The researchers said that men with low resistance to stress are about 18 to 50 per cent more likely to suffer from the disease than those who feel less stressed. The psychosocial stress in adulthood are linked to higher risk of the disease but researchers wanted to determine if the link applied to low stress resilience in late adolescence.

The researchers, one from the US and another from Sweden, studied cohort of all 1.54 million military conscripts in Sweden during 1969-1997 when the national service was mandatory for all and was included most of the 18 year old men in the country. They studied those men who were not diagnosed with the disease earlier.

They used standardised psychological assessment to determine stress resilience and also studied type 2 diabetes from outpatient and inpatient diagnoses during 1987-2012. They found that low stress resilience was associated with an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes after taking into consideration, the body mass index, family history of diabetes, and individual and neighbourhood socio-economic factors. They found that 20 per cent of men with the lowest resistance to stress were 50 per cent more likely to have been diagnosed with the disease than the 20 per cent with the highest resistance to stress.

The study is published in the journal Diabetologia.