Diabetes Epidemiology: Worldwide, U.S.

Diabetes has grown worldwide at an alarming rate and according to various studies and the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of people with diabetes in the world is at least 240 million, with India, China, and the United States leading the way. The number of people with diabetes is expected to grow by 380 million by year 2025.

                 
Despite the differences in the projections by various health organizations, it is clear that diabetes is an ever-growing epidemic with no end in sight.

Diabetes epidemiology is found in Caucasoid populations in the United States and Europe and, more importantly, among Native Americans, Pacific Island populations, persons of Asian Indian origin, Hispanics and African Americans. It is now known that Type 2 diabetes is more related to your diet, lifestyle, and physical activity more so than being related to family genes.

Starting in the second half of the 20th century, the prevalence of non-insulin-dependent (type 2) diabetes increased substantially in many populations and ethnic groups, including African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans Americans, and Pacific Islanders.

Around 3.2 million deaths every year are attributable to complications of diabetes -- that's six deaths every minute!

The top 10 countries, in numbers of sufferers, are India, China, USA, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Brazil Italy and Bangladesh.

Overall, direct health care costs of diabetes range from 2.5% to 15% of annual health care budgets, depending on local diabetes prevalence and the sophistication of the treatment available.

The costs of lost production may be as much as five times the direct health care cost, according to estimates derived from 25 Latin American countries.

Recent studies in China, Canada, USA and several European countries have shown that feasible lifestyle interventions can prevent the onset of diabetes in people at high risk.

In the United States (May 2011) there are more than 26 million people with diabetes -- that's 8% of the population, with an additional 42 million who are unware that they have diabetes. In addition, there are more than 57 million people in the U.S. with pre-diabetes!

In Europe, the prevalence of diabetes has been proposed as a European Community Health Indicator. The prevalence of diabetes known to general practitioners (GPs) in different European countries has been investigated and the usefulness of sentinel practice networks in delivering prevalence data on diabetes has been evaluated.

In China, diabetes is already a substantial concern, with 21 million cases in the year 2000, or one in every 60 people. Obesity is on the rise – a recent study showed that even among Chinese pre-school children, obesity rates increased tenfold to affect one in every 10 children over an eight-year period. This extra weight increases their risk of diabetes as they grow older.

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.

India has a population of more than a billion with more than 35 million diabetics, and its citizens appear prone to developing diabetes later in life, and are certainly more vulnerable to its complications such as high blood pressure leading to coronary heart disease.

Part of the blame falls on the adoption of a more Western lifestyle, involving fatty food and too little exercise.  In 20 years, projections are that there may be a staggering 75 million Indian diabetics.

In Italy, Germany and Japan, diabetes is on the rise. In Bahrain and Cambodia and Mexico — where industrialization and Western food habits have taken hold— it is rising even faster. For the world has now reached the point, according to the United Nations, where more people are overweight than undernourished.

Refer to this web page for more detailed statistics about people with diabetes in the U.s. and around the world.

More than 90 percent of all diabetics have type 2 diabetes. Unlike the more rare form of the disease, type 1 diabetes, people with type 2 diabetes produce insulin and therefore seldom need therapeutic insulin at the initial onset of the disease.

Type 2 diabetes is considered a late-onset chronic disease and is associated with risk factors such as increased obesity, dietary fat intake, smoking, and low physical activity. Racism, stress, and socioeconomic status have also been implicated in the development of diabetes. Diabetes is diagnosed by measuring the percentage of red blood cells that are bound with glucose. There is no cure for diabetes, but the traditional treatment includes alterations in diet, exercise, and drug therapies to control glucose metabolism.

Prevalence rates follow a strikingly similar pattern in varied populations. For First Nations Canadian men and women, age-adjusted prevalence rates are 3.6 and 5.5 times higher, respectively, than among the general Canadian population. Among Indigenous Australians, the prevalence rates are almost four times higher than the rate for the non-Indigenous population. Researchers comparing age-adjusted prevalence rates for Nigerians and people of African origin living elsewhere found diabetes rates were

2.5 to 5 times higher for those living in the Caribbean and United Kingdom. In the United States, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) estimates that at least 8 to 10 percent of all Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans aged twenty years or older have diabetes. The comparable prevalence rates for non-Hispanic whites is 4.8 percent.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. The World Health Organization (WHO) has called diabetes an emerging epidemic, with more than 24 million people affected in the United States and millions more in the rapidly urbanizing Southern Hemisphere and China.

According to the WHO, approximately 366 million people worldwide will have diabetes by 2025. The very similar epidemiological patterns that exist for U.S. minorities, First Nations Canadians, Indigenous Australians, peoples of the African diaspora, and peoples of the Pacific Islands strongly indicate that diabetes disproportionately affects subordinated groups around the world.

Diabetes as a Biocultural Disease

As a racializing practice, gene-based approaches to diabetes advance the myth that biology can explain social phenomena. In fact, considerable evidence suggests that biology and social phenomena are co-produced, that biological and social phenomena develop in mutually interdependent ways. In its most crude form, this is evident when genetic researchers use social labels to describe human groups, which renders their findings both biological and social in origin.

Similarly, researchers using evolutionary models for complex diseases require genetic samples of the populations most impacted by diabetes. They are thus investigating the physiological impact of social stratification and the radical lifestyle transformation required of advanced capitalism.

Viewing complex disease through a genetic lens is a long-established sociocultural phenomenon, one that has been applied to diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, hypertension, and diabetes. For diabetes, the alleged metabolic adaptation within the thrifty genotype hypothesis presumes that hunter-gatherers experienced severe episodes of feast and famine. Selective evolutionary pressures would therefore favor those whose metabolism would best convert glucose to fat for use during periods of food scarcity.

Contemporary human groups impacted by diabetes are viewed as genetically predisposed to the disease by virtue of their current similarity to the lifeways of earlier humans. However, both the extent of the feast-and-famine cycles of hunter-gatherers and the association of contemporary human groups with early human life-ways are unsubstantiated premises, relying on presumed rather than empirically supported benefits of modernity.

The widespread adherence to the evolutionary hypothesis of diabetes (and the considerable resources directed toward such studies) is another iteration of a race theory that advances the cultural notion that diabetes affects human groups differently because of innate genetic differences.

Examining diabetes as an evolutionary trait denies the impact of the social dislocation, dispossession, colonization, slavery, racism, and other sociohistorical impact on those groups affected by diabetes. For example, the groups most disproportionately impacted by diabetes, Native Americans, experienced extreme deprivations during the violent dispossession of their lands and subsequent attempts by white settlers to eradicate them. It is the children and grandchildren of those born during this period who now suffer disproportionately from diabetes.

These conditions support the fetal origins hypotheses and do not require the logical leap that such recent experiences could have evolutionary significance, and thus result in genotypic human variation. Thus, the widespread adherence to the genetic predisposition thesis for diabetes reflects a dominant cultural way of making sense of relations between groups impacted by the disease.

In order to understand the causes of diabetes, its evolutionary hypothesis must be seen as fitting not the natural history of the disease, but rather the ideological premise of a subordinating majority whose scientists refuse to seriously account for the social history of those peoples most impacted by the disease. Researchers seriously interested in preventing diabetes would greatly benefit by approaching the disease in ethnoracial groups as a biocultural phenomenon.

To avoid merely reproducing another unprovable evolutionary genetic predisposition claim, researchers must carefully investigate diabetes as the biological impact of economic and sociocultural changes for human life. This requires uncommon multi-disciplinary methods spanning the biological and social sciences and humanities. More importantly, researchers must actively counter the racialized hypothesis of genetic predisposition, especially in research into health inequalities among minority and emerging majority groups in parts of the world with high levels of ethnoracial stratification and an unequal distribution of resources.

In short, researchers must recognize the link between diabetes and institutional racism.

Alarming Statistics

The true facts about diabetes are staggering. According to World Health Organization the number of diabetics through out the world was 171 millions in the year 2000. It was to become 336 millions by 2030.

In 2000, India topped the list with 31 million diabetics. China had 21 and America had 17 million. India was to have 79 millions by 2030 and America 30 million. But it was an understatement. Facts falsified these estimates.

The Worst Affected

If the same trend continues in India, this country will have 184 million diabetics in 2030 whereas WHO estimated it as 79 million. The true facts about diabetes are staggering indeed! 

Neuropathy & Impotence

About 65% of people with diabetes are afflicted by diabetic neuropathy. This results in burning pain in the feet and hands or loss of sensation. After forty, at least 30% of diabetics have lost sensations in their feet.

Neuropathy & Amputations

Diabetes damages blood vessels and nerves. Victims suffer foot disease with torturing pins and needles sensations. Facts about diabetes reveal peripheral neuropathy as the leading cause for lower limb amputations.

Diabetic neuropathy leads to ignored sores, wounds, or infections which form gangrene by tissue death. It causes leg, feet, or finger amputations. More than 60 % of such amputations occur in people with diabetes.

Erectile Dysfunction

As per the latest facts, diabetic neuropathy inhibits brain endocrine commands for sex urge. It also inhibits sex hormone secretions. This and blood vessel damage lead to erectile dysfunction and impotence.

Note: For more information about the science of Type 2 diabetes, go to the following links:
-- The Pathophysiology
--  Statistics
-- More Facts & Figures
--  Overview of Diabetes

-- Medical Sciences
-- Nutritional Science

Note: If you want to to learn more about diabetes and if you're serious about reversing and defeating your diabetes, request a free copy of the author's research paper titled The 7 Mistakes That Diabetics  Make.

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