has more than doubled since 1980 to 347 million, a far larger number
than previously thought, a new study has found.
An international team of researchers working with the World Health
Organization has found that the rates of diabetes have either risen
or, at best, remained essentially the same all over the world in the
past 30 years, the study, published in The Lancet journal, says.
The estimated number of diabetics is far higher than a previous
projection, which put thenumber closer to 285 million. Of the 347
millionwith diabetes, 138 million live in China and India, with
another 36 million in the United States and Russia.
Type 2, the most commontype of diabetes, is strongly associated with
obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.
"Diabetes is becoming more common almost everywhere in the world,"
said Majid Ezzati, from Britain's Imperial College London, who led the
study along with Goodarz Danaei, from theHarvard School of Public
Health in the United States.
"Unless we develop better programs for detecting people with elevated
blood sugar andhelping them to improve their diet and physical
activity and control their weight, diabetes will inevitably continue
to impose a major burden on health systems aroundthe world," Danaei
said in a joint statement.
People who suffer from diabetes have inadequate blood sugar control,
an affliction that can lead to serious complications, including heart
disease, stroke, kidney or nerve damage and blindness.
According to experts, high blood glucose and diabetes lead to around
three million deaths around the world every year, a number that will
continue to rise as the number of people affected increases.
New treatments
Dozens of different treatments for the disease are available on the
market in both pill and injection form. Global sales of the medicines
hit $35 billion last year, and could rise to as high as $48 billion by
2015, according to IMSHealth, a drug research firm.
New research that is due to be presented this weekend at the
AmericanDiabetes Association's annual meeting in San Diego will focus
on experimental drugs and methods of combining classes of medication
to better control blood sugar.
A new type of diabetes pill being developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb
and AstraZeneca has proven to be effective at fightingthe disease,
according to a new two-year study, but the companies said higher rates
of bladder and breast cancers were seen in users of the drug.
1.4 per cent of patients treated with Dapagliflozin developed some
type of cancer, compared with 1.3 per cent of control group patients,
said Elisabeth Bjork, vice president of development for Dapagliflozin
at AstraZeneca.
"This is a chronic, progressive condition," said Dennis Urbaniak, vice
president of drug-maker Sanofi's diabetes division. "What we are most
worried about is the number of people out there with diabetes that is
not optimally controlled."
Diabetes has proven to be a booming market for drug manufacturers like
Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, Merck and Takeda.
For the Lancet study, the largest of its kind for diabetes,
researchers analyzed fasting plasma glucose (FPG) data for 2.7million
participants aged 25 and over across the world, using advanced
statistical methods to estimate the prevalence of the disease.
They found that between1980 and 2008, the number of adults with the
disease rose from 153million to 347 million. Seventy per cent of the
rise was due to population growth and ageing, with the other 30per
cent due to higher prevalence, they said.
The proportion of adults with diabetes by gender also increased, with
9.8 per cent of men and 9.2 per cent of women in 2008 affected by the
disease, compared to 8.3 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively in
1980.
Island countries in the Pacific now have the highest diabetes levels
in the world, the study found. In the Marshall Islands, a third of all
women and a quarter of all men have diabetes.
The rise was high in North America, but relatively low in Western
Europe. Diabetes and glucose levels were highest in United States,
Greenland, Malta, New Zealand and Spain, and lowest in the
Netherlands, Austria and France.
The region with the lowest glucose levels wassub-Saharan Africa,
followed by east and southeast Asia.
PHOTO CAPTION
File photo of patients eating at a weight-reduction clinic in
Tianjinin northern China.
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