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For smokers under pressure to give up in 2010, it will seem like the ultimate excuse: quitting smoking appears to increase the risk of diabetes.

Smokers are on average 30 per cent more likely than non-smokers to develop type 2 or adult-onset diabetes. Now a study of 10,892 adults over 10 years has found that, in the first six years after giving up, former smokers are 70 per cent more likely than non-smokers to develop the disease.

and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, found that the risk of diabetes is highest straight after quitting and gradually reduces to that of non-smokers. This is most likely because quitting makes people more likely to put on weight, which is known to increase the risk of diabetes.

The results shouldn’t discourage people from quitting, but former smokers should gradually increase the amount of exercise they do, suggests Martin Dockrell of the UK anti-smoking charity .

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