Huge Rise in Asian Diabetes Rates

Research published in the medical journal Lancet reveals that life-threatening diabetes is becoming an epidemic not only in North America, but in Asia as well. And it appears to be only getting worse.

According to doctors at the Catholic University of Korea in Seoul, 194 million Asians were diabetic in 2003, a statistic that could soar to 330 million by the year 2025.

The Lancet research suggests Asians are developing diabetes at a younger age and at lower weight; they suffer longer with complications; and the also die earlier than people in developed countries. This onset of adult diabetes in increasingly younger populations will negatively affect Asian countries economically, as a result of higher health costs and mortality rates.

And while nearly one million people die from diabetes-related heart disease and stroke each year worldwide, another study in the Lancet also reveals that pre-diabetic conditions can be equally deadly. A Harvard School of Public Health team has found that elevated blood sugar below the diabetes threshold kills more than two times as many people every year as diabetes does — specifically, 2.2 million people, with 84% of these living in developing countries.

“Of these 2.2 million, many of them are not called diabetics,” says researcher Majid Ezzati, who led the Harvard study. “They are people who could have benefited from lowering their blood glucose, but they are not at the threshold that we call disease.”

When the total annual deaths from high blood sugar, including diabetes, are tallied together, the sum is over three million. Ezzati puts this number into perspective, by comparing it to the nearly five million deaths each year related to smoking, and the four million due to high blood cholesterol.