Pakistan is amongst the 10 countries in the world that are most affected by diabetes and six of these countries are Asian. Pakistani youth were vulnerable to diabetes as due to unhealthy life style followed by them more and more cases were being noticed.
The leading Cardiologist and Fellow American College of Cardiology, Professor Dr Naeem Tareen said, while talking to Business Recorder, here on Wednesday.
'Regular exercise, maintaining proper weight and healthy eating habits, not only help control the diabetes but also in its prevention', he said. To a question, Professor Tareen said that recent studies show that diabetes triples risk of heart failure for women. Diabetes also triples the likelihood that postmenopausal women with coronary heart disease will develop heart failure, he added.
Studies also indicate that women get heart failure to the same extent as men. Nevertheless, "not much was known about what predisposes women to heart failure, except that they seemed less likely to have a preceding heart attack than men," he added.
According to him, nine predictor of heart failure were diabetes, arterial fibrillation, heart attack, impaired kidney function, high blood pressure, current smoking, obesity, conduction disturbances and left-sided heart enlargement.
To a question, he said women who were also obese, the annual rate of heart failure was 8 percent. In diabetic women with kidney impairment, it was 13 percent. "Many of the risk factors we uncovered are, of course, the same ones seen in men," Professor Tareen said.
He further said that eating red meat also increases diabetes risk in older women. 'Over 194 million people now live with diabetes world-wide, and by 2025 more than 333 million will have the disease if steps are not taken on urgent basis to prevent it. Obesity, particularly abdominal obesity, is a major modifiable risk factor for type 2 diabetes, which accounts for over 90 percent of all diabetes' he pointed out.
To a query, he said the cost of medical care and lost productivity due to diabetes was an estimated $132 billion a year, double the cost of caring for people who don't had the disease. Diabetes was already placing a heavy burden on healthcare resources and the number of people at risk had huge implications for healthcare budgets, he added. Quality of life for patients and their families could be improved and expenses could be reduced if people had better access to preventive care, were diagnosed earlier and had more intensive care for diabetes and its complications, he said.
According to Professor Tareen, diabetes was a major threat to global public health that was rapidly getting worse and the biggest impact was on adults of working age in developing countries. In most developing countries, at least one in ten deaths in adults, aged 35 to 64 was attributable to diabetes, and in some the figure was as high as one in five.
He maintained that obesity was not only a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes but also for other non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease (heart attack and stroke).
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