Indians account for a quarter of the world's adult diabetes patients

About a quarter of the 828 million adults globally living with diabetes — either type 1 or 2 — are in India, a paper published in The Lancet said on Wednesday.

- Rhythma Kaul

Apart from the 212 million patients in India, other high disease burden countries include China with 148 million adults, followed by the USA (42 million), Pakistan (36 million), Indonesia (25 million) and Brazil (22 million), the report said.

The report flagged a lack of access to treatment, with 445 million adults aged 30 years and older (59%) globally being deprived of proper care in 2022. The number of such adults in India stood at 133 million, which is a staggering 30% of the diabetics living without treatment.

The researchers compared data between 1990 to 2022, and found that the current prevalence is at least four times more than what it was in 1990, and three-and-a-half times the number in 1990 of those who were living without treatment.