The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Diabetes is preventable: study

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Diabetes is preventable: study

Staff Reporter

Diet, exercise, appropriate drugs have proved effective in prevention

CHENNAI : Diet, exercise and appropriate drugs have proved effective in preventing diabetes in a study which surveyed a population of 11,000 subjects over a span of four-and-a-half years, to provide empirical backing to a worldwide maxim.

The Indian Diabetes Prevention Programme (IDPP) led by the Diabetes Research Centre shares a convergence of findings with similar studies such as the Diabetes Prevention Programme in the United States, the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study and the Da Quing effort in China. All the studies showed that progression of Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT), regarded as the prediabetic stage, can be prevented or delayed through primary prevention programmes.

However, the IDPP is stated to be the first and largest prospective controlled study in South East Asia and differed from the western studies in focusing on a non-obese population. The study found that conversion to diabetes was reduced by nearly 30 per cent by the recommended strategies that did not include weight reduction.

The results of the IDPP were published in the February issue of Diabetologia-International Journal of Diabetes.

The first phase of the study involved identifying people at high risk of developing diabetes, or those with IGT. Of the total subjects screened, 531 patients with IGT were shortlisted for follow-up for the next three years.

Apart from the control group, the other patients, who were split into three groups, were advised intervention strategies such as lifestyle modification including a half-hour walk every day, use of a drug (metformin) and a combination of lifestyle modification and drug.

One of the important findings that emerged from the three-year-long follow-up was that there was no improvement in risk reduction in the group that followed a combination of drugs and lifestyle changes.

This group registered a risk reduction of 28.2 per cent while the diet-exercise group had a 28.5 per cent risk reduction and the drugs-alone group recorded 26.4 per cent risk reduction.

Almost 55 per cent of the control group got diabetes, representing a rather high conversion rate in a three-year period for a non-obese, yet highly insulin-resistant Indian population.

"The findings that diabetes is preventable through a simple and practical approach assume relevance in a low-resource setting like India," said A. Ramachandran, DRC Director and principal investigator of the study.

Next to smoking, diabetes is the major cause of heart disease in the urban Indian population.

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