Diabetes has become a worldwide epidemic over the last three decades, with the number of diabetics more than doubling to 347 million and threatening to inflate the costs of treatment in coming years.
An international team of researchers working with the World Health Organization found that diabetes rates have either climbed or stayed the same in virtually all parts of the world since 1980, according to the study published in The Lancet.
The number is significantly greater than a previous projection of 285 million diabetics worldwide, reports Reuters. Of the 347 million people with diabetes, 138 million live in China and India and another 36 million in the U.S. and Russia, the study found. More than two thirds of the increase was due to rising population and life expectancy, and the rest to higher rates of the disease.
Obesity and a sedentary lifestyle are primarily to blame for Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease.
“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,” said Goodarz Danaei from the Harvard University School of Public Health, who led the study with Majid Ezzati from Britain’s Imperial College London.
People with diabetes have inadequate blood sugar control, which can lead to such complications as heart disease, stroke, damage to the kidneys or nerves, and blindness.
As a result, diabetes has become a boon to drugmakers like Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, Merck and Takeda. Global sales of pills and injectable diabetes medications totaled $35 billion last year and could reach $48 billion by 2015, according to drug research firm IMS Health.
New research being presented at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association, which began Friday in San Diego, will focus on experimental drugs and combining classes of medicines to better control blood sugar.
“This is a chronic, progressive condition,” said Dennis Urbaniak, vice president of Sanofi’s diabetes division. “What we are most worried about is the number of people out there with diabetes that is not optimally controlled.”
For The Lancet study, the largest of its kind, researchers analyzed data from 2.7 million participants aged 25 and over across the world, and then used advanced statistical methods to estimate prevalence.
They found that between 1980 and 2008, the number of diabetic adults rose to 9.8 percent of men and 9.2 percent of women in 2008, compared with 8.3 percent of men and 7.5 percent of women in 1980. Seventy percent of the increase was due to population growth and aging, with the other 30 percent due to actual increases in diabetes rates caused by diet and lifestyle factors.
Diabetes has increased most dramatically in Pacific Island nations, which 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 are diabetic.
Among wealthy countries, the increase was greatest in North America and relatively small in Western Europe. Diabetes and glucose levels were highest in the U.S., Greenland, Malta, New Zealand and Spain, and lowest in the Netherlands, Austria and France.
The region with the lowest glucose levels was sub-Saharan Africa, followed by east and southeast Asia.
