World Diabetes Day: Number of Indians with diabetes likely to double in next decade
Asians have a 2–4-times higher risk of type 2 diabetes than white Europeans.
With a prediabetes prevalence of 10.3% among adults, people with diabetes in India are likely to more than double in the next decade from the current 70 million, a study by the country’s apex research organisation has estimated.
The prevalence of prediabetes — also known as “impaired glucose tolerance” and a precursor to diabetes — is 1.4 times higher than the diabetes prevalence of 7.3%, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research-IndiaB study of 57,117 adults over 20 years from 14 states and the Union Territory (UT) of Chandigarh.
Around 47.3% of India’s 70 million diabetics are undiagnosed and do not know they have high blood glucose levels that, if left untreated, lead to complications such as blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, stroke and foot amputation, the study found.
Diabetes emerged as India’s seventh biggest cause of early death in 2016, up from 11th in 2005, shows data from Institute of Health Metrics & Evaluation .
Diabetes prevalence is higher in affluent states and UTs like Chandigarh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, but pre-diabetes prevalence, which ranged from 6% in Mizoram to 14.7% in Tripura, was high across states irrespective of income.
Even a state like Bihar with a low diabetes prevalence of 4.3% had 10% people with prediabetes, indicating that diabetes cases would shoot up in the state over the next decade.
Data from 15 states from the ongoing INdia DIABetes(INDIAB)study to track diabetes and prediabetes prevalence threw light on the overall prese Continue reading