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Twenty years after November 14 began being observed as World Diabetes Day across the Pacific, the need to make people aware that diabetes is on a charge in India, Tamil Nadu and specifically in Chennai, has arrived.
Dr V Mohan, who heads Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Speciality Centre, says that the incidence of type-2 diabetes in people under 20 has seen an alarming rise in the last five years.
“From a situation where it was almost impossible to find anyone under 30 with type-2 diabetes, in our centre alone we have seen almost a five-fold increase over the past decade or less,” he reveals. The reason is a mantra we have heard often: lifestyle, diet and obesity, says Dr Mohan.
Add to this the fact that juvenile diabetes has become a rising problem in the country and we have a very large problem that is scarcely being addressed. “According to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, it is estimated that there are over one million children with juvenile diabetes (type-1) in India,” says Dr Vijay Viswanathan, MD of MV Hospital for Diabetes in Royapuram.
The facts get scarier: Annually, out of 27,000 children aged 12-14 who die across the world, 12,000 are in India. “This is to give you a picture of how many juvenile diabetics in Tamil Nadu are insulin-dependent for life,” he said at the launch of the ‘Changing Diabetes in Children’ programme in Chennai recently.
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