More 15–49-year-olds at risk of developing diabetes, years lost to poor health up 50%: Study

New Delhi: Prevalence of metabolic issues such as those related to blood pressure, sugar and body mass index (BMI) has increased in people, signifying consequences of an ageing population and changing lifestyles, according to global research published in The Lancet journal.

Researchers found that years lost to poor health and early death (disability-adjusted life years or DALYs) because of these metabolism-related issues have increased by close to 50 per cent between 2000 and 2021.

They also found that people aged 15-49 years were increasingly vulnerable to high BMI and blood sugar, both of which are known to raise the risk of developing diabetes. Other risk factors for this age group include high blood pressure and high LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol.

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“Though metabolic in nature, developing these risk factors can often be influenced by various lifestyle factors, especially among younger generations,” said Michael Brauer, an affiliate professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, US.

“They also are indicative of an ageing population that is more likely to develop these conditions with time,” said Brauer. The IHME coordinates the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, the “largest and most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss across places and over time.”

The researchers forming the GBD 2021 Risk Factors Collaborators presented estimates of disease burden due to 88 risk factors for preventable, non-communicable diseases and associated health outcomes for 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2021. Disease burden is the impact of a health problem on a given population, measured through varied indicators such as deaths, disability, or financial costs.

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The findings showed that addressing these diseases by targeting the modifiable risk factors presents an “enormous opportunity to pre-emptively alter the trajectory of global health through policy and education,” according to the authors.

Air pollution due to particulate matter (PM), smoking, low birth weight and shorter pregnancy durations were also found to be among the largest contributors to DALYs in 2021, with considerable variations across ages, sexes, and locations.

The greatest declines in disease burden occurred for risk factors related to mother and child health and unsafe water, sanitation, and handwashing, with particularly high rates of these declines observed in regions ranking lower on the Socio-Demographic Index (SDI), the researchers said.

This suggested that public health measures and humanitarian health initiatives of the past three decades have been successful, they said.

However, despite the progress, the authors found that disease burden linked with mother and child malnutrition remained high in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania, along with areas of North Africa and the Middle East.