It is a well known fact that once you get into a relationship, certain things you used to do may have to change slightly… anything worth having requires a little compromise sometimes right? However no matter how hard you try, you'll usually end up sharing at least one or two of your partners habits. Now many factors influence the onset of Type 2 Diabetes, it can be effected by weight, age, ethnicity and lifestyle (among other factors), but a new systematic review and meta analysis (the most valid type of study) has concluded that the risk of type 2 Diabetes increases by 20% for individuals whose partners already have the disease. These are almost certainly linked to behavioural and environmental factors, but the link is none the less there!
Senior authors suggest the following:
"If you diagnose diabetes in one spouse, consider evaluating the other"
(Dasgupta, 2014)
The chances of a spouse having the disease is thought to increase because of shared dietary habits and activity levels which may have contributed to the original spouse developing the condition in the first place.
Reference
Leong, A., Rahme, E., & Dasgupta, K. (2014). Spousal diabetes as a diabetes risk factor: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Medicine. Retrieved 31st January, 2013, from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/12/12