Diabetes rates will double worldwide by 2030, to 366 million people with the disease, even if the obesity rate remains stable, an international team of researchers reported on Monday.
But the rate will go up even higher if, as expected, more and more people become overweight, eat a so-called Western diet and stop exercising, the researchers said.
“The total number of people with diabetes is projected to rise from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million in 2030,” the researchers wrote in the latest issue of Diabetes Care, published by the American Diabetes Association.
Diabetes is a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin, a hormone needed to convert sugar, starches and other food into energy.
Sarah Wild of the University of Edinburgh in Britain and colleagues in Australia, Denmark and Switzerland, looked at type-2 diabetes figures from around the world, using United Nations data to project future diabetes rates based on current trends.
“Assuming that age-specific prevalence remains constant, the number of people with diabetes in the world is expected to approximately double between 2000 and 2030, based solely upon demographic changes,” Wild and her colleagues said.
“The greatest relative increases will occur in the Middle Eastern Crescent, sub-Saharan Africa, and India.”
The figures do not include type-1 or juvenile diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease separate from type-2 diabetes.
Enormous costs
Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York was to issue a report on Monday finding that heart disease, once an illness of the rich, is killing more and more people in poor countries.
The report blames cigarette smoking, cheap food and urban living and said heart disease was taking the lives of middle-aged people in the developing world, just as they reach their peak economic potential.
The Columbia researchers noted that obesity and diabetes were also on the rise on the developing world.
Diabetes and heart disease are closely linked. Both are strongly associated with a poor diet and lack of exercise.
“The human and economic costs of this epidemic are enormous,” Wild and colleagues said, calling for “a concerted, global initiative” to address the epidemic.
A 2001 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected that 29 million Americans would be diagnosed with diabetes by 2050. Currently an estimated 16 million Americans have type-2 diabetes.
