Diabetes continuing to spike in China
The more common type of diabetes in China grew by 30 percent in just seven years, according to a new survey of thousands of Shanghai residents.
The curse of affluence appears to be affecting China as it has many other developing countries.
“There is a certainly a pattern that we’re seeing over and over again,” said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the vice president for global health at Emory University.
People with type 2 diabetes have trouble processing sugar in their blood, but do not generally require insulin to manage the condition. As countries become more wealthy, lifestyle factors associated with type 2 diabetes - such as weight gain, less healthy diets and less physical activity - tend to become more common.
“Unlike the gradual transition in most Western countries, these changes in China have occurred over a very short time,” the researchers, led by Dr. Rui Li at the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, write in their study in the journal Diabetes Care.
The research team interviewed more than 12,000 people in 2002 and 2003. They asked whether the participants had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and they screened people for diabetes who had not been diagnosed before.
They found that 9.7 percent of people had diabetes.
China now the country with the largest number of people with diabetes
Previous estimates in the International Diabetes Federation’s (IDF) Diabetes Atlas Fourth Edition - published in October 2009 - put the number of people with diabetes in China at 43.2 million, based on the best evidence available at the time.
Now, it would appear China has overtaken India and become the global epicentre of the diabetes epidemic with 92.4 million adults with the disease.
Some of the difference between the old and new estimates for China may be due to differences in methodology. However, the new figures certainly reflect a rapid increase in the prevalence of diabetes over recent years.
Due to the new study, we expect the projected estimates of the number of people with diabetes in the year 2030 will be close to half a billion.
Why the large disparity between the old and new estimates; implications for policy maker
It is not entirely surprising that the new study estimates there are nearly twice as many people in China with diabetes than previously thought. IDF based its 2009 figures for China on the findings of a study by Gu et al in 2003 - the best data available at the time. It is important to note that IDF uses a conservative modelling approach. When new studies are conducted around the world, we see a leap in diabetes figures.
We welcome the findings of this new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The methodology is good as it uses a large, well-constructed sample and the gold standard method for detecting diabetes, the Oral Glucose Tolerance Test, as recommended by the World Health Organization.
This shows that the global burden of diabetes is far larger than previously estimated. It is a wake-up call for governments and policy-makers to take action on diabetes - a major public health problem.
The researchers surveyed about 7,400 people again in 2009, and found that 12.6 percent of people had the disease.
“That’s a remarkable increase in seven years,” Koplan told Reuters Health.
The spike was even more dramatic among the rural residents in the study - going from 6.1 percent to 9.8 percent, a 60 percent increase.
Diabetes and Respiratory Diseases in China
- Diabetes is increasingly becoming a serious problem in China. The disease is growing there in sheer numbers faster than anywhere else in the world. The number of people suffering from diabetes has reached 92 million in China, almost 10 per cent of its population of 1.3 billion, according to a March 2010 study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Diabetes is becoming common with younger and younger people in China. One out of every 20 diabetes sufferers in Beijing is 13 or younger. Many blame the trend on increased obesity occurring at younger and younger ages and a more fat- and sugar-laden Westernized diet and fast food. Most new cases are Type II diabetes which associated with obesity and lack of exercise. Some Asian ethnic groups are particularly susceptible to Type II diabetes.
- Only one third of those who have diabetes have been diagnosed and of those only about half are being treated. Many Chinese have traditionally used herbal medicines to treat their condition and do not even know what insulin treatments is. The Chinese government is starting to aggressively seek help from the large international drug companies on treating and containing the disease.
- Respiratory diseases cause nearly a quarter of all deaths in China, compared with 2 or 3 percent in the United States. Rates are particularly high in the countryside, where respiratory disease is the number one killer. Many respiratory diseases are air pollution related. Even though women smoke less than men they suffer equally from diseases like lung cancer and bronchitis.
- Tuberculosis rates are rising. There are 29.7 cases of the disease per 100,000 people, compared to 56.7 per 100,000 in Russia; 34.3 in Japan; 15.0 in Germany; 10.6 in Britain, and 8.7 in the United States. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is widespread in several provinces of China.
According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, 8.3 percent of Americans have diabetes.