Number of People With Diabetes More Than Doubles Worldwide Since 1980

Nearly 350 million adults worldwide have diabetes, according to a new study, more than double the number 30 years ago and the latest sign that the prevalence of the disease is increasing.

The study, led by Goodarz Danaei of the Harvard School of Public Health and Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, analyzed diabetes data from 1980 to 2008. Their analysis found that while in 1980, 153 million adults had diabetes, by 2008, that number had swelled to 347 million.

That increase led the researchers to conclude that systems need to be developed to detect, prevent, and manage diabetes.

“Unless we develop better programs for detecting people with elevated blood sugar and helping them to improve their diet and physical activity and control their weight, diabetes will inevitably continue to impose a major burden on health systems around the world,” Danaei said in a statement.

Increases in diabetes prevalence occurred both in men and women and in most areas of the world. 8.3 percent of men and 7.5 percent of women had diabetes in 1980, but by 2008, worldwide prevalence increased to 9.8 percent of men and 9.2 percent of women.

In the United States, diabetes prevalence jumped from 6.1 percent to 12.6 percent among men and 5.1 percent to 9.1 percent among women, according to the study.

While east and southeast Asia and central and eastern Europe saw almost no change in prevalence, rates increased in almost every other area of the world. They rose most dramatically in Oceania, where 15.5 percent of men and 15.9 percent of women are now diabetic. The region has the highest prevalence in the world.

Besides Oceania, the highest rates occurred in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. High-income countries with the highest rates included the United States, Greenland, Malta, Spain, and New Zealand, while the lowest rates were in the Netherlands, Austria, and France.

Diabetes cases in China and India alone account for 40 percent of all cases worldwide.

Researchers attributed 70 percent of the total increase to changes in population size and life expectancy, meaning 30 percent was the product of other factors.

"The obesity problem in the developing world is increasing," said Yuan Lu, a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Health and one of the researchers. “That might be one of the reasons [for increased prevalence]. Dietary factors, blood pressure, and important risk factors also have an increasing trend in the developing world."

The lowest blood glucose levels, the best indicator of diabetes, were found in Sub-Saharan Africa and east and southeast Asia.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization funded the study, which was published on Saturday in the Lancet.

—Staff writer Leanna B. Ehrlich can be reached at lehrlich@college.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following clarification.

CLARIFICATION: June 28, 2011

Due to an editing error, the headline of an earlier version of this article ("Diabetes Rate Almost Doubles Worldwide Since 1980") was misleading. The diabetes rate in the United States approximately doubled, while the number of people with diabetes in the world more than doubled, according to the study.