Women who smoke carry a greater risk of developing type-2 diabetes than their non-smoking counterparts, according to a study led by Dr. John Forman of Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He and his team of researchers followed 100,000 women over a period of 24 years beginning in 1982. Throughout those years about one in every 18 of them developed diabetes. Each year of the study, around 30 women who smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day developed diabetes compared with about 25 non-smoking women.

The risk was highest for ex-smokers and women exposed to second hand smoke. Of these groups of women, around 39 developed diabetes each year, and ex-smokers were 12% more likely to develop diabetes than women who were around second-hand smoke on a regular basis.

Before this study, the potential risk of diabetes from second hand smoke was unknown. Dr. David Nathan of the Diabetes Center at Massachusetts General Hospital said in regards to limiting exposure to cigarette smoke, “This just reinforces the lesson from a public health point of view that we’ve been stressing for decades”. Dr. Nathan also said that there’s no reason why these statistics wouldn’t apply to men as well, even if the study only followed women because the diabetes risk factors are the same for both genders.