Diabetes has emerged as a major healthcare problem in India. According to Diabetes Atlas published by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), there were an estimated 40 million persons with diabetes in India in 2007 and this number is predicted to rise to almost 70 million people by 2025. The country with the largest number of diabetic people will be India. Due to these sheer numbers, the economic burden due to diabetes in India is amongst the highest in the world.
According to the WHO estimate, the diabetes, heart disease and stroke together will cost about $ 333.6 billion over the next 10 years in India.
"Self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) is an important and integral component of modern therapy for diabetes mellitus. SMBG helps people with diabetes to adjust their dietary intake, physical activity, and insulin doses to improve glycemic control on a day-to-day basis", says Dr. Bhuwnesh Agrawal, managing director, Roche Diagnostics India Pvt Ltd.
"The current advancement has made self-monitoring very simple and accurate. SMBG makes it simple for patients to get an FBG (fasting blood glucose) or PPBG (post prandial blood glucose) checked at home without the need to visit a laboratory or visit a diabetologist to get their medications altered, says Vivek Kamath, Business Head, Roche Diagnostics.
As the living conditions improve in India, we are increasingly following western dietary habits unsuited for our environs, adopting sedentary life style, and exposed to psycho-social stress. This has resulted in an unprecedented rise of diabetes to epidemic proportions during last few decades in our country.
Also, lack of proper healthcare infrastructure, rampant ignorance and absence of clear cut guidelines mean that approach to the management of diabetes is adhoc. The lack of awareness among patients and general practitioners (GPs) is a key factor in the poor care. There are practically no nurse educators or diabetic counsellors, no podiatrists (foot experts) and very few dieticians, which mean that the treating doctor has no support and has to take the entire burden of caring for these patients. The patients' inability/unwillingness to pay for this additional support also hinders the treatment.
Even after the diagnosis, monitoring of diabetes is very poor. Most of the patients initially visit a doctor and then discontinue their therapy once their symptoms are controlled. Patients also keep on changing doctors and hop from one system of treatment to another leading to further complications and early death. Unless we manage the disease at an early stage, the economic, medical and social burden will become overwhelming making it increasingly difficult to control the diabetes epidemic.