Diabetes- A cause for Serious Concern

In the middle of the night you wake up with thirstiness, frequent nature call, tiredness, lethargic body et all.. is the start of your life long journey with diabetes. Diabetes is not a disease; it’s a way of life. As the saying goes “till diagnosis you live for eating post diagnosis you eat for living”, this simple change in lifestyle makes managing diabetes much easier.

We Indians are more prone for diabetes than almost any other population in the world, the fact of the matter raises serious concern on the disease burden on the society. India has acquired the title of diabetic country, Andhra has become the diabetes state and Hyderabad has become the diabetic capital as per latest study.?

The general belief is that diabetes and heart disease are exclusive to the affluent societies. As the economy grown, living conditions improved in India, we are increasingly following western dietary habits unsuited for our environs, adopting sedentary life style, and exposed to psycho-social stress. This has resulted in an unprecedented rise of diabetes to epidemic proportions during last few decades in our country. Indian government healthcare policies and budgetary allocations are skewed towards addressing communicable disease than non-communicable disease. ?

As per the recent national survey on diabetes coordinated by Prof. M.M.S. Ahuja and Dr. P.V. Rao who was with Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences. About 2% of the 12,000 people surveyed in Indian villages were found to be diabetic, and more alarming observation was that half of them did not know that they had diabetes. The same in urban clusters has much higher incidence of diabetes. This infers that there are at least 30 million diabetics in India, which is the highest ever incidence reported, from anywhere in the world.

Moreover, Indians tend to be diabetic at a relatively young age of 45 years which is about 10 years earlier than in West. The life expectancy in a diabetic is just about 8 years after the onset of the disease, as they succumb to kidney as well as heart disease more often than others.

Understanding diabetes, living with diabetes and preventing further complications should be the major focus of all healthcare providers rather than prescribing drugs and restricting diets are not the right answer to alleviate epidemic problem of diabetes.

This is indeed a serious concern for the society and government to address on a war footing. The amount of burden it puts on the GDP is huge, hence the government has to prioritize and come out with a sustainable long term strategy to address the problem.