By Sayantani Chatterjee
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of patients with diabetes mellitus or most usually referred to as diabetes. A Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology study which referred to more than 61 million healthcare records in the U.K. mentions in its findings that 30% of COVID- 19 deaths occurred in people today with sort 1 and sort 2 varieties. Diabetes people today are more prone to getting infected, as elevated blood sugar levels can impair a patient’s immune program.
This is especially worrisome for India with a higher diabetes burden – a 2019 survey which maps out the prime ten nations for people today aged among 20–79 years with diabetes, India ranks second just soon after China, with a diabetes burden of 77 million.
To avert and handle widespread non-Communicable Diseases, the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke (NPCDCS) was operational beneath National Health Mission as a aspect of thorough main healthcare in 2010. As aspect of this scheme, frontline overall health workers such as ASHA and ANM execute population-based screening and at the exact same time work towards creating awareness about the threat aspects of NCDs.
Currently, the initiative is beneath implementation in 682 districts across the nation as per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Given the higher mobile usage in India, an application referred to as mDiabetes is also operational for creating awareness, advocating sustainable therapy, and instilling healthier habits like obtaining nutritious meals or engaging in physical workout amongst the masses. There have been quite a few media campaigns as properly for creating awareness about the threat aspects, causes and symptoms of diabetes. There has been an elevated government thrust on NCD prevention and management in 2019, the Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan referred to as for a “Jan Andolan” to combat many sorts of NCDs.
In spite of adopting such a multipronged strategy, the information from the National NCD Monitoring Survey (NNMS) report, which was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research – National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research (ICMR-NCDIR), Bengaluru and released in January 2021 highlights the worrisome reality that 9.3% of the surveyed population had raised blood glucose. Moreover, the quantity of people today with undiagnosed diabetes in India is at a staggering 43.9 million.
With the rising prevalence of diabetes, there appears to be a rise in the incidence of Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) as properly. Data shows that, about 10% of pregnancies globally are linked with diabetes and surprisingly about 90% of it is since of GDM. The prevalence of gestational diabetes to be as higher as 17.9% in unique components of India. Women who have GDM and their young children have more possibility of creating sort 2 diabetes in later life.
All this hints at the reality that there is absolutely a lacuna someplace and India desires to have a more productive national diabetes prevention programme that needs the help from quite a few quarters like healthcare education, overall health awareness campaigns at early stages.
Moreover, current policies/schemes such as NPCDCS are more focused on prevention and screening/detection and lack a great deal concentrate on diabetes management which also is equally crucial. Factors like poor overall health literacy, restricted overall health budgets, inadequate overall health infrastructure and clinical experience, lack of educated diabetes educators, higher out-of-pocket overall health expenditures and so forth. are some big policy gaps towards diabetes management.
There is a require to have elevated policy thrust to handle diabetes as though it can not be cured it can be managed efficiently. For that, there must be sustained conversations on the subject coupled with aggressive mass media campaigns. Lack of common awareness about diabetes and its complications amongst the population also leads to ineffective diabetes management practices and their implementation.
National Digital Health Mission, which was launched by Prime Minister, Narendra Modi in 2020 calls out for programmes like National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Strokes (NPCDCS) to be integrated so that relevant Health ID and healthcare records can be collated for superior implementation of programmes. Once this is operational, artificial intelligence (AI) must be leveraged to its maximum prospective to recognize populations susceptible to diabetes and screening must be facilitated accordingly. If applied efficiently artificial intelligence (AI) also has the capacity to help in managing diabetes owing to more precise monitoring of diabetic neuropathy and diabetic ulcers and avoiding circumstances of limb amputations.
Additionally, when the nation is speaking about Digital Health Mission and employing technologies for healthcare, there is a substantial gap in technologies adoption therefore there will have to be sufficient intervention to boost digital literacy about the usage of digital devices/apps to monitor diabetes by means of many platforms.
Hence, to lower the diabetic burden of India instant multipronged action has to be taken in a proactive manner in the situation it is not by 2030 the quantity of diabetic patients is probably to rise to 101 million which is bound to impact the overall health indicators of this nation.
(The author is Public policy consultant-Chase India. Views expressed are the author’s personal.)