Banjot Kaur 
New Delhi: The diabetes rates among men and women in India has gone up by 10-12 percentage points in 2022 as compared to its prevalence in 1980, a new study by Lancet released on November 13 says.
Currently, 21.4% of men and 23.7% of women of India suffer from diabetes. India has historically been the diabetes capital of the world. The latest study pegs the total number of diabetes cases in India at 212 million. This accounts for 26% of total diabetes cases in the world – the highest proportion contributed by any country.
But what is more worrying is that a majority of diabetes patients are not receiving any treatment in India.
As per this study, only 27.8% of the entire cohort of women suffering from the disease have any treatment coverage. Similarly, only 29.3% of men receive treatment.
Treatment coverage has only minimally improved in the last 44 years, despite India now having a dedicated treatment and prevention plan for diabetes incidence. The treatment coverage for women and men in 1980 were 21.6% and 25.3% respectively.
India contributes to 30% of the world’s untreated diabetes cases – the highest, again. This amounts to 133 million people.
China has 78 million untreated cases – the second highest. The difference between the country contributing the highest and the second highest number of such cases is more than 50%.
Pakistan and Indonesia have 24 million and 18 million diabetes cases that are not under any sort of treatment coverage.
“We also found that the current variations in treatment were largely related to the extent of diabetes under diagnosis, which means that improving case detection is a prerequisite to increasing treatment coverage,” the study’s authors say.
The Lancet assessment also points out that countries in South Asia are not doing enough to prevent the early onset of diabetes. It said:
“In countries with universal health insurance and good access to primary care, people at a high risk of diabetes might also be identified early and advised to use a combination of diet and lifestyle modifications and medicines to prevent or delay diabetes onset. This approach is less widely used in low-resourced health systems with limited attention to, or resources for, diabetes screening.”
Genetic and phenotypic (environmental factors) differences also contribute to a country’s having a higher diabetes population than other countries. But this becomes all the more relevant in countries in South Asia, where these factors are also accompanied by weight gain due to childhood nutrition choices and foetal development.
India accounts for the second-highest proportion of obese children in the world after China, a paper published in 2022 had noted.
The report also pitches for increasing the financial accessibility of people towards buying healthy food like fruits and vegetables. This is important for countries like India, because the last ‘State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World’ report said that as many as half of Indians (55%) are not able to afford a healthy diet.
“Improving affordability and accessibility of healthy foods and sports is particularly important for poorer families and marginalised communities, and requires measures such as targeted cash transfers, subsidies or vouchers for healthy foods,” the authors say.
The report advocates that countries must levy a higher rate of taxes on foods containing refined carbohydrates that lead to weight gain.
“In addition to obesity, the consumption of specific foods might influence the risk of diabetes. For example, yoghourt and possibly some other forms of dairy, whole grains, and green leafy vegetables reduce the risk of diabetes, whereas refined carbohydrates, including in sugar-sweetened beverages, increase this risk,” the study notes.