Global aging and rising body weight will more than double the number of people with diabetes by 2050, researchers predicted, putting millions more people at risk of a variety of dangerous disorders.
More than 1.3 billion people worldwide will have diabetes at the half-century mark, up from 529 million in 2021, according to estimates released Thursday by the Lancet medical journal. The vast majority of patients will have Type 2 diabetes, the form of the disease that¡¯s often linked to being overweight.
A loss of the body¡¯s ability to control blood sugar levels, diabetes affects 1 in 10 adults globally and caused 6.7 million deaths in 2021, the International Diabetes Federation estimates. The disease has unequal impacts, with fewer than 10% of people affected in low and middle-income countries receiving proper care, the Lancet researchers note.
¡°If we don¡¯t do anything,¡± said Kanyin Liane Ong, a researcher at the University of Washington¡¯s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the lead author of the study, ¡°it will cause a huge burden.¡±
Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease, accounting for about 96% of cases. It occurs when the body¡¯s cells stop responding properly to insulin, which can lead to chronic high blood-sugar levels that leave patients vulnerable to heart, kidney, eye and nerve damage. Although preventable in many cases, usually with weight loss, and treatable with a variety of effective drugs, rates of the disease remain stubbornly high.
Effective weight-loss programs have proven hard to implement at large scale, and many health-care systems are not prepared to intervene in diabetes early, the researchers note. And while drugs such as those in the GLP-1 class made by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly have shown promising weight-loss results, costs put them out of reach for many patients globally, the authors said, and they haven¡¯t been used widely enough yet to determine whether they can turn the tide.
Addressing racism and economic inequality will be important for controlling diabetes, a group of researchers from the U.S., Africa, India and Australia, wrote in a separate article in the same journal. People in low¡ª and middle-income countries are more likely to suffer from the disease and its impacts, as are minority groups.
There isn¡¯t one perfect solution, Ong said.
¡°Diabetes will always exist, and I think it is about managing and monitoring and identifying it early on,¡± she said.
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