Diabetes continuing to spike in China

The more common type of diabetes in China grew by 30 percent in just seven years, according to a new survey of thousands of Shanghai residents.

The curse of affluence appears to be affecting China as it has many other developing countries.

"There is a certainly a pattern that we're seeing over and over again," said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the vice president for global health at Emory University.

People with type 2 diabetes have trouble processing sugar in their blood, but do not generally require insulin to manage the condition. As countries become more wealthy, lifestyle factors associated with type 2 diabetes - such as weight gain, less healthy diets and less physical activity - tend to become more common.

"Unlike the gradual transition in most Western countries, these changes in China have occurred over a very short time," the researchers, led by Dr. Rui Li at the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, write in their study in the journal Diabetes Care.

The research team interviewed more than 12,000 people in 2002 and 2003. They asked whether the participants had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and they screened people for diabetes who had not been diagnosed before.

They found that 9.7 percent of people had diabetes.

China now the country with the largest number of people with diabetes Previous estimates in the International Diabetes Federation's (IDF) Diabetes Atlas Fourth Edition - published in October 2009 - put the number of people with diabetes in China at 43.2 million, based on the best evidence available at the time.

Now, it would appear China has overtaken India and become the global epicentre of the diabetes epidemic with 92.4 million adults with the disease.

Some of the difference between the old and new estimates for China may be due to differences in methodology. However, the new figures certainly reflect a rapid increase in the prevalence of diabetes over recent years.

Due to the new study, we expect the projected estimates of the number of people with diabetes in the year 2030 will be close to half a billion.

Why the large disparity between the old and new estimates; implications for policy maker

It is not entirely surprising that the new study estimates there are nearly twice as many people in China with diabetes than previously thought. IDF based its 2009 figures for China on the findings of a study by Gu et al in 2003 - the best data available at the time. It is important to note that IDF uses a conservative modelling approach. When new studies are conducted around the world, we see a leap in diabetes figures.

We welcome the findings of this new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The methodology is good as it uses a large, well-constructed sample and the gold standard method for detecting diabetes, the Oral Glucose Tolerance Test, as recommended by the World Health Organization.