LAHORE, Pakistan: Around eight percent of the population of Pakistan is living with diabetes due to absence of effective health care, stress, sedentary lifestyle and unbalanced diet.
This was stated by Dr. Sadaqat Ali, Project Director Diabetic’s Institute Pakistan (DIP) while talking to APP here on Thursday. He said a large number of patients did not know about the disease as they never bothered to get fitness/health checkup.
Dr Sadaqat believes the reasons behind the rise in the disease in Pakistan are–use of unhealthy diet, increasing trend of junk and fast food, soft drinks, smoking, overweight, obesity, physical inactivity, stress and depression, fluctuating sleep pattern, especially among young, and lack of periodic checkup of blood sugar level. Obesity tops the list, he stressed.
“Less than six hours and long greater than nine hours sleep durations may be considered as a higher risk linked to developing diabetes”, he added.
In the World about 422 million people have diabetes.
That’s almost four times the number of people living with diabetes than in 1980. Most of them live in developing countries, and factors driving this dramatic rise include overweight and obesity, stated a report by the World Health Organization issued on its website on the occasion of World Health Day.
World Health Day 2016: WHO calls for global action to halt rise of diabetes and improve care for people with diabetes.
As per WHO’s “Global report on diabetes”, the number of people living with diabetes and its prevalence are growing in all regions of the world. In 2014, 422 million adults (or 8.5% of the population) had diabetes, compared with 108 million (4.7%) in 1980.
The epidemic of diabetes has major health and socio-economic impacts, especially in developing countries, stated the report.
The complications of diabetes can lead to heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and lower limb amputation.
Diabetes caused 1.5 million deaths in 2012.
