Brief report Diabetes and life expectancy among Japanese – NIPPON DATA80 Tanvir Chowdhury Turin a,b, *, Yoshitaka Murakami c , Katsuyuki Miura b , Nahid Rumana b , Aya Kadota b , Takayoshi Ohkubo b , Tomonori Okamura d , Akira Okayama e , Hirotsugu Ueshima b,f for the NIPPON DATA80 Research Group a Department of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada b Department of Health Science, Shiga University of Medical Science, Otsu, Shiga, Japan c Department of Medical Statistics, Shiga University of Medical Science, Otsu, Shiga, Japan d Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan e The First Institute for Health Promotion and Health Care, Tokyo, Japan f Life-style Related Disease Prevention Center, Shiga University of Medical Science, Otsu, Shiga, Japan 1. Introduction Life expectancy (LE) at birth in Japan is now the longest in the world [1,2]. Along with the demographic transition of the aging population, epidemiologic and nutritional transitions are underway causing non-communicable diseases like diabetes mellitus to be on the rise in Japan [3–5]. Studies measuring the impact of diabetes mellitus on LE have been predomi- nantly performed in Western populations [6,7]. On the other hand the effect of diabetes mellitus on LE has not been reported in the Japanese population. This information will be of importance for this aging society as it is unclear how diabetes affects LE in this population with the highest longevity in the world. In the present study, we estimated the LE among Japanese with or without diabetes mellitus. d i a b e t e s r e s e a r c h a n d c l i n i c a l p r a c t i c e 9 6 ( 2 0 1 2 ) e 1 8 – e 2 2 a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 12 December 2011 Received in revised form 15 December 2011 Accepted 3 January 2012 Published on line 31 January 2012 Keywords: Life expectancy Diabetes Japan a b s t r a c t Life expectancy (LE) among the Japanese population with or without diabetes mellitus was estimated. LE in 40-year old men and women was 41.1 and 47.5 years in those without diabetes and 32.3 and 40.9 years in those with diabetes. The LE of 40-year old men and women with diabetes was 8.8 and 6.6 years shorter than in those without diabetes. Diabetes mellitus leads to a decrease in LE. The presence of impaired glucose tolerance also affected LE inversely. # 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: Department of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Tel.: +1 403 210 7199; fax: +1 403 210 9180. E-mail addresses: turin.chowdhury@ucalgary.ca, dr.turin@gmail.com (T.C. Turin). Contents available at Sciverse ScienceDirect Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/diabres 0168-8227/$ – see front matter # 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.diabres.2012.01.003