Diabetes cases grow to almost 350 million worldwide

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Since 1980, the number of adults with diabetes worldwide has more than doubled to 347 million, likely meaning that the costs of treating the disease will also rise considerably.

An international team of researchers working with The World Health Organization (WHO) published a study in the The Lancet journal reporting that rates of diabetes have either risen or at best remained the same in virtually all parts of the world in the past 30 years. The number of diabetics estimated in the study is considerably higher than previous projections that estimated the number at 285 million worldwide. The proportion of adults with diabetes rose to 9.8 percent of men (from 8.3 percent in 1980) and 9.2 percent of women in 2008 (from 7.5 percent in 1980).

This study found that the majority or people with diabetes live in China and India, followed by the United States and Russia. Type 2 diabetes (strongly associated with obesity and a sedentary lifestyle) is the most common type.

Majid Ezzati, from Britain’s Imperial College London, who led the study along with Goodarz Danaei from the Harvard School of Public Health in the United States, warned “Unless we develop better programs for detecting people with elevated blood sugar and helping them to improve their diet and physical activity and control their weight, diabetes will inevitably continue to impose a major burden on health systems around the world.”

People with diabetes have inadequate control of their blood sugar, which can lead to serious complications like heart disease or stroke, damage to the kidneys or nerves and/or blindness. According to experts, high blood glucose and diabetes cause about 3 million deaths globally each year.

Dozens of diabetes treatments, both pills and injections made by companies like Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, Merck and Takeda , are on the market. Global sales of diabetes medicines totaled $35 billion last year and could go up to as much as $48 billion by 2015, according to drug research firm IMS Health.

Dennis Urbaniak, vice president of Sanofi’s diabetes division said “This is a chronic, progressive condition…What we are most worried about is the number of people out there with diabetes that is not optimally controlled.”

The Lancet study was the largest of its kind for diabetes. In the study, researchers analyzed fasting plasma glucose (FPG) data from 2.7 million participants aged 25 and over across the world, and then used advanced statistical methods to estimate how prevalent the condition was. The study found that between 1980 and 2008, the number of adults with diabetes rose from 153 million to 347 million, 70 percent of which was due to population growth and aging.

Source:  MSNBC Health