Over 800 million people Living with Diabetes, More Than Half Not Receiving Treatment: Study Finds - Video

Over 800 million adults living with diabetes, more than half not receiving treatment, global study published in the lancet suggests.

Key highlights of the study are:

The global rate of diabetes (type 1 and 2 combined) in adults doubled from approximately 7% to about 14% between 1990 to 2022, with the largest increase in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Over the same period, rates of treatment for diabetes stagnated at low levels in many of the same low- and middle-income countries where rates of the disease have drastically increased, resulting in almost 450 million adults aged 30 and over with diabetes globally (59%) who did not receive treatment in 2022.

Meanwhile, people living in North America, Australasia, central and western Europe, and parts of Latin America and East Asia and the Pacific saw a significant improvement in treatment rates for diabetes from 1990 to 2022, contributing to widening global inequities in diabetes treatment.

Authors say the study highlights the urgent need for financing of medicines and comprehensive diabetes programs that enable early detection and effective treatment of diabetes in low- and middle-income countries.

The study, conducted by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), is the first global analysis of trends in both diabetes rates and treatment which includes all countries. Researchers used data from over 140 million people aged 18 years or older from more than 1,000 studies in populations of different countries.

The authors used statistical tools to bring all the data across different years, ages and countries together, and estimate diabetes rates and treatment in a way that enables comparisons across countries.

Reference: Worldwide trends in diabetes prevalence and treatment from 1990 to 2022: a pooled analysis of 1108 population-representative studies with 141 million participants, Zhou, Bin et al., The Lancet, Volume 0, Issue 0, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)02317-1