TAIPEI, Taiwan - Doctors can predict rather accurately if someone is prone to diabetes by looking at their waistline, according to a research paper released by a hospital in Taiwan yesterday.

Chang Yi-cheng, a physician of the metabolism and endocrinology department at National Taiwan University Hospital's Yun-lin branch, said that this is because big waistlines are one of the four risk factors for diabetes.

Chang, one of the co-authors of the research paper published in December's Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association, noted that by evaluating the four risk factors, doctors can predict a person's chance of developing diabetes with up to 75 percent accuracy.

The other three risk factors are age, history of taking high blood pressure medication and a family history of diabetes, he added.

In the research conducted by the hospital in Yunlin County, the hospital gave a free blood test to 676 people in 2006 and 1,938 people in 2008 and found some of them had diabetes.

The study later looked for the four risk factors in all the people who were given the blood tests, Chang said. Researchers found that 75 percent of the people who had all four risk factors had also been previously found to have diabetes through the blood tests.

Of the four risk factors, Chang said, age, family history and history of taking high blood pressure medication cannot be changed, but one's waistline can be controlled by oneself.

"Men's waistline should not exceed 90 cm while women's waistline should not exceed 80 cm," he said.

Chang and Lin Chao-wei, director of the hospital's Cardiology Department, conducted the research under the guidance of Professor Chuang Li-ming of National Taiwan University and Huang Jui-jen, deputy superintendent of the hospital.