Obesity and poor lifestyle, including sedentary living, could have contributed to the rise
India, a country with the highest disability-adjusted life-years (DALY), also saw the highest number of childhood diabetes cases and deaths in 2019 in the world. One DALY represents the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health, according to the World Health Organization.
Globally, there has been a 39.4 per cent increase in incident cases since 1990.
For many years, childhood diabetes generally constituted type 1 diabetes (where the pancreas does not make insulin).
An increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes in children (where the pancreas makes less insulin than it used to, and the body becomes resistant to insulin) is being recorded due to the global epidemic of childhood obesity.
Obesity and poor lifestyle, including sedentary living, could have contributed to the rise. Most affected children also have a parental history of type 2 diabetes.
Experts analysed trends in diabetes incidence, diabetes-associated mortality and DALYs in children. This was done from 1990 to 2019 using data from the Global Burden of Diseases (GBD), 2019 in 204 countries and territories. The analysis included 1,449,897 children, consisting of 738,923 males and 710,974 females.
To explore the link between childhood diabetes burden and socioeconomic development, the researchers classified countries based on their socioeconomic index (SDI), which ranges from 0 to 1 and grouped into low, low-medium, medium, medium-high, and high.
The largest increase in cases (52.06 per cent) was recorded in children aged 10 to 14 years and the smallest increase (30.52 per cent) in those aged between 1 and 4 years. Incidence rate, which describes how quickly a disease occurs in a population, was 10.92 and 11.68 in 1990 and 2019, respectively.
In contrast, the global number of diabetes-associated deaths in children dropped by 20 per cent (to 5,390 in 2019 from 6,719 in 1990). Similarly, the diabetes-associated death rate decreased to 0.28 per 100,000 in 2019 from 0.38 per 100,000 in 1990.
Further, the low-middle SDI region saw the highest increase in 2019 (with 55,496 cases), and the high-middle SDI region topped the list in diabetes incidence.
In 2019, the low SDI region showed the highest number of diabetes-associated deaths, (with 2,367 fatal cases) and the most diabetes-associated DALYs (59.92 per cent increase in 2019 from 1990.)
“Countries in the high SDI region like Monaco have a low diabetes disease burden and the lowest diabetes-associated mortality rate, whereas countries in the low SDI region like India have a high diabetes disease burden and high diabetes incidence,” the researchers wrote.
Environmental and occupational risks caused six per cent of childhood diabetes-associated deaths in 2019. High and low temperatures caused three per cent of childhood diabetes-associated deaths in 2019.
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