In what can be bitter news for many Indians, a new research published in Diabetologia (journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) shows that more than half of men (55 per cent) and some two-thirds (65 per cent) of women aged 20 years in India will likely develop diabetes, with around 95 per cent of those cases likely be type 2 diabetes (T2D) ― a lifelong disease that keeps your body from using insulin the way it should.

The research was conducted by a team of authors in India, the UK and the US, led by Dr Shammi Luhar, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, UK, collaborating with Dr V Mohan, Chairman and Chief of Diabetology at Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities Centre, President and Director of the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, and Dr Nikhil Tandon of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.

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India already has a significant health burden caused by diabetes with estimates suggesting 7.7 crore adults currently suffer from the disease and this number is expected to almost double to 13.4 crore by 2045.

In a serious warning to Indians living in cities, the study says factors such as urbanisation, decreasing diet quality, and decreased levels of physical activity, together have inflated the burden of the hidden epidemic ― diabetes.

“The remarkably high lifetime risk of developing diabetes in India’s metropolitan cities, especially for individuals with obesity, implies that interventions targeting the incidence of diabetes are be of paramount importance,” said Mohan.

The study showed obesity as having a substantially negative impact on the population. It also showed that the lifetime risk was highest among obese metropolitan Indians ― at 86 per cent among 20-year-old obese women, and 87 per cent among obese men.

“The fact that Indians and other South Asian populations already have a higher predisposition to developing diabetes at lower ages (up to a decade earlier) and lower BMIs compared with white European population makes prevention of diabetes even more of a priority,” said Dr RM Anjana, MD and Diabetologist, Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities Centre and Vice President, Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, Chennai, and another author of the study.

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