[Prevention of diabetes mellitus]

Diabetes mellitus is one of the most common chronic diseases in the developed countries and is a major cause of blindness, renal failure or amputations, all of which require expensive health-care resources. Diabetes is also associated with the increased risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and a substantial reduction in life expectancy. Therefore, prevention of diabetes is desirable. Recently, epidemiological studies have provided a basis of understanding the environmental determinants of diabetes and several prospective studies have shown that in the aggregate, intensive therapy improves health-care status by improving not only microvascular disease but also macrovascular disease in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.