The very good news is that this can be controlled by a proper diet mostly
of vegetables and beans, seeds and nuts with salad and scant meats. We are even beginning to understand all this.
The Chinese problem is that it has snuck up on them after they suddenly
discovered they could eat all the rich foods they like. They will need concerted action around diet
to solve this crisis unless they want life spans to collapse.
It is disconcerting and removes any further thoughts that Chinese Cuisine
happens to be independently healthier when a cursory inspection begs that
question. Maybe not.
China's Unspoken "Catastrophe" - 11.6% Of
The Population, Or 114 Million, Have Diabetes: More Than The US
While China was
absorbing all the best that the "West" had to export to it over the
past three decades (credit cards, MTV, inflation, apps, youtube), it was also
importing the worst. Such as a sedentary, lazy lifestyle which at a massive
social scale, usually has one inevitable conclusion - diabetes. And even as the world is
focused on all the other pending crashes China has to offer: housing, credit,
demographic, it has been largely ignorant of what is rapidly becoming a
"catastrophic" epidemic. According to Bloomberg, which cites just released findings in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, "the most comprehensive
nationwide survey for diabetes ever conducted in China shows 11.6 percent of adults,
or 114 million, has the disease. This means that another 22 million diabetics,
or the population of Australia, have been added to a 2007 estimate and means
almost one in three diabetes sufferers globally is in China. By
comparison in America "only" 11.3% of the population have been
diagnosed with diabetes.
The bigger problem
for China, unlike other "developed" countries that have a healthcare
safety net to provide government assistance to a pathologically sicker, more
obese population - one of the primary drivers for America's unsustainable
healthcare government outlays as can be seen on the chart below - China has
none, and to create it would require the kind of structural reform that China
has been tentatively engaging in for years yet never fully implemented.
Chinese are developing the metabolic disease at a lower
body mass index than Americans, the researchers found, meaning that changes in
diet and physical activity stoked by rapid economic development are resulting
in an earlier onset of the obesity-linked disease. The epidemic will worsen with
40 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds on the verge of developing diabetes, which
increases the risk of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure.
“Diabetes in China has become a catastrophe,”
said Paul Zimmet, honorary president of the International Diabetes Federation
and director emeritus of the BakerIDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne.
“The booming economy in China has brought with it a medical problem which could
bankrupt the health system. The big question is the capacity in China to deal
with a health problem of such magnitude.”
China overtakes
the US in diabetes:
Yesterday’s report is based on a survey of a nationally
representative sample of 98,658 Chinese adults in 2010. A similar survey in
2007 pegged diabetes prevalence at 9.7 percent, or 92.4 million adults. The latest results means
diabetes is now more common in China than in the U.S., where 11.3 percent of
adults are diabetic.
The Brussels-based International Diabetes Federation
estimates there are 371 million people worldwide with the disease, including
92.3 million in China.
The increase in the prevalence of diabetes in China,
estimated at about 1 percent in 1980, has been “unparalleled globally,” Zimmet
said in a telephone interview.
“China is now among the countries with the highest diabetes
prevalence in Asia and has the largest absolute disease burden of diabetes in
the world,” wrote authors led by Guang Ning in the laboratory for endocrine and
metabolic diseases at the National Health and Family Planning Commission. “Poor
nutrition in utero and early life combined with over-nutrition in later life may
contribute to the accelerated epidemic of diabetes in China.”
But if 114 million
is catastrophic, what
adjective will be used when the nearly half a billion already with high glucose
levels develop the disease? Just how massive would the healthcare safety net
have to be to deal with the fall out of hundreds of billions in annual
healthcare needs?
The study incorporated measurements of glycated hemoglobin
A, or HbA, into its diagnosis, adopting updated guidelines from the American
Diabetes Association, in addition to tests used in earlier studies: glucose
readings taken after patients fasted for a period of time, and a measurement of
the amount of sugar in the blood two hours after patients consumed a sweet
drink.
The added criteria may have partly contributed to the
increased prevalence, Guang and colleagues wrote. The scientists estimate half
of adults in China, or
493.4 million people, have higher-than-normal blood glucose levels, which put them in a pre-diabetic state.
493.4 million people, have higher-than-normal blood glucose levels, which put them in a pre-diabetic state.
“These data document a rapid increase in diabetes in the
Chinese population,” according to the study’s authors, who include researchers
from Beijing’s Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns
Hopkins University in Maryland. “Diabetes may have reached an alert level in
the Chinese general population, with the potential for a major epidemic of
diabetes-related complications, including cardiovascular disease, stroke, and
chronic kidney disease.”
And since nearly
two-thirds of those with diabetes have no idea they are sick, it is possible
that the real number of Chinese diabetics is over 300 million, or almost as
much as is estimated total global sufferers.
Almost two-thirds of patients treated for diabetes didn’t
have adequate blood-sugar control, the authors found. For every person in China
diagnosed with diabetes, at least two more will be unaware they have it.
Why are so many
Chinese suddenly falling sick? Same reason as in America: behavioral changes,
in this case affecting primarily a population that is even more susceptible
than westerners.
“Rapid lifestyle changes in China have caused rising trends
in obesity, and that is now bringing out the abnormality of a people
biologically more vulnerable to diabetes,” Juliana Chan, a professor of
medicine and therapeutics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a
telephone interview.
As in the rest of Asia, the burden of diabetes is falling
disproportionately on the young and middle-aged, the authors said. Pre-diabetes
was present in 40 percent of adults ages 18 to 29, and 47 percent among those
30 to 39.
Finally, the costs
of prevention, and failing that, for hundreds of millions sick, will be
obviously staggering:
China’s rising prevalence of diabetes has strained its
health services and helped fuel a 20 percent-a-year growth in drug sales,
stoking the need for newer and costlier medications from companies including
Merck & Co., Novo Nordisk A/S and Sanofi.
China’s government is trying to fight the scourge by
expanding basic medical coverage, buying more medicines in bulk to lower costs,
and conducting a corruption probe of international drugmakers, including
GlaxoSmithKline Plc.
Which begs the
question: is the recent crackdown on western healthcare providers merely a
salvo in what will be a "quid pro quo" in which China will allow the
large western pharma companies access to the massive Chinese market on the
condition that these companies fund a portion of the preventative healthcare
needs of the Chinese population? If so, and since the Glaxos of the world thrive
on obese, sick people (bribes or not), we doubt this "catastrophe"
will have a very happy ending.
No comments:
Post a Comment