80 per cent diabetes sufferers live in so-called low and middle-income countries

 

A research by the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, has found that around three-quarters of the world’s people with diabetes cannot get the treatment they need.

The report also warned of “huge drop-offs” in care worldwide.

Of the about 420 million diabetes sufferers in the world, 80 per cent live in so-called low and middle-income countries. 

Conversely,“fewer than six per cent of these individuals can access the care they need to manage their diabetes and prevent long-term complications like heart attacks, strokes, kidney diseases or blindness,” the researchers said,

Making treatment more widely available could result in “healthy life time lost to patients from diabetes” over a decade jumping “by around six per cent,” according to the team, which included researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The findings were based on analysis of patient data covering over 23,000 people from 67 countries and were published by The Lancet Global Health, a British medical journal.