THURSDAY, Nov. 14, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Fourteen percent of the world’s people (more than 800 million) now have diabetes, doubling the global rate of the blood sugar disease since 1990, they show some recent statistics.
Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 95% of cases, is increasing in poorer countries. However, in these resource-poor countries, only half of people receive treatment, said a team appearing in a report published November 13 in the journal The Lancet.
That means about 445 million people with diabetes are not controlling their blood sugar levels in ways that could keep them healthy.
At the same time, people living in wealthier countries saw an increase in their treatment rates, noted a team led by Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London (ICL).
All of this “highlights growing global inequalities in diabetes, with stagnant treatment rates in many low- and middle-income countries, where the number of adults with diabetes is rising dramatically,” said Ezzati, professor of global environmental health at ICL. .
“This is especially concerning because people with diabetes tend to be younger in low-income countries and, in the absence of effective treatment, are at risk of lifelong complications, such as amputation, heart disease, kidney damage or loss of life. vision, or, in some cases, premature death,” he noted in a magazine news release.
The new analysis is the first global estimate of diabetes case numbers and treatment rates that includes all countries, the researchers noted. The data included 140 million adults who participated in more than 1,000 studies located in different countries.
According to Ezzati and colleagues, an estimated 828 million adults were living with diabetes in 2022, quadrupling the number of cases since 1990, when 198 million adults were estimated to have the disease.
Diabetes rates rose most rapidly in poorer countries. While some rich countries (Japan, Canada, France, Spain and Denmark) experienced no changes or slight decreases, the opposite occurred with lower-income countries.
For example, in Pakistan, the rate of diabetes among women has skyrocketed from 9 percent in 1990 to nearly 31 percent in 2022, the analysis showed. Pacific island nations have adult diabetes rates exceeding 25 percent, as do populations living in the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, according to the report.
But wealthier nations were not immune: The United States had the highest diabetes rate of rich countries, at 11.4 percent among women and 13.6 percent among men.
Rising obesity and poor-quality diets are to blame for much of the rise in type 2 diabetes rates around the world, the researchers noted.
According to study co-author Dr. Ranjit Mohan Anjana of the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in India, “our findings highlight the need to see more ambitious policies, especially in the world’s lowest-income regions.” , which restrict unhealthy foods, make healthy foods affordable and improve opportunities for exercise through measures such as healthy food subsidies and free healthy school meals as well as promoting safe places to walk and do. exercise, including free entry to public parks and gyms.
Meanwhile, too many people are going without treatment.
Treatment rates varied widely between countries. The world leader is Belgium, where 86% of women with diabetes and 77% of men receive adequate treatment.
However, in some poorer countries, more than 90 percent of people with the disease do not receive treatment, according to the analysis.
“Our findings suggest that there is a growing proportion of people with diabetes, especially untreated diabetes, living in low- and middle-income countries. In 2022, only 5 to 10 percent of adults with diabetes in Some countries in sub-Saharan Africa have been treated for diabetes, leaving large numbers at risk of serious health complications,” said study co-author Jean Claude Mbanya of the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon.
More than 133 million people in India have untreated diabetes, according to the report, and 73 million people in China are also untreated.
Experts believe that many of these untreated people don’t even know they have diabetes.
“The majority of people with untreated diabetes will not have received a diagnosis, therefore increasing diabetes screening must be an urgent priority,” Mbanya stressed.
More information
Learn more about type 2 diabetes from the American Diabetes Association.
SOURCE: The Lancet, press release, November 13, 2024
