Overview

• Globally, people die from diabetes frequently (every 7 seconds) and half of them are younger than 60 years old, according to International Diabetes Federation statistics. Annually, this amounts to 4 million patients.
• The prevalence of diabetes globally is "8.8% of the world population in 2017" (i.e. 424.9 million) and will increase to 9.9% by 2045 (628.6 million people).
• Globally, it affects mostly people who fall in the 40 – 59 years age range and especially in countries ranked as low and middle income.
• Diabetes is currently one of the leading causes of death and presents complications for kidney failure (>50%), cardiovascular disease, neuropathy as well as amputations.
• The Pacific and Middle Eastern islands tend to have the "highest prevalence of diabetes".

Evolution

• In 1980, 108 million adults were living with diabetes worldwide while in 2014 there were 422 million adults.
• Between 1980 and 2014, the global prevalence for the adult population doubled from 4.7% to 8.5%.

Doctors' perspective

• Indian doctors currently disagree with some aspects of the global guidelines in treating diabetes such as "relaxing the long-term blood sugar target ". Concerns stem from the fact that for several decades, the principle was to use a measure of HbA1c of 6.5% to determine that someone was diabetic and this has now been increased to "HbA1c level between 7% and 8% " which was traditionally 6.5 to 7% for patients who are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
• The "Time in Range" concept is considered to be more useful for diabetics given the clarity it presents in the glucose range and target time to aim for. It can also be used as a short-term diagnostic tool.