Qatar's new plan to tackle diabetes 'epidemic'

CENTRE PLAN: Qatar is planning a medical centre of excellence to tackle the epidemic of diabetes. (Getty Images)

Qatar is planning to establish a centre of medical excellence to tackle the growing epidemic of diabetes and obesity among its population, the minister of health said on Monday.

The government is also encouraging research programmes to discover new forms of treatment for diabetes and investigating whether there is a genetic link to the disease among natives of the Arabian Gulf, as well as a public health programme raising awareness about the importance of a healthy lifestyle, said Ghalia Al Thani on the sidelines of BioQatar Symposium 2008, a biotechnology conference in Doha.

As many as 12 percent of adult Qataris responding to the 2008 Qatar World Health Survey suffered from diabetes, compared to 8 percent in a similar survey in 1998. Thirty percent of respondents were classified as pre-diabetic.

Less than 30 percent of the 29,338 adults who responded were of normal weight, with 40 percent overweight and 30 percent obese. 28 percent of children were overweight.

“Qatar, like the rest of the world, is facing an epidemic of diabetes, which is hitting us quite hard. We have diabetes related to lifestyle issues specifically obesity and lack of exercise and seeing a trend among children and adults,” she said.

She said Qatar was in the planning stage for the centre of excellence, but added that it would “hopefully have something on the ground soon.”

Dr Elias Zerhouni, former director, National Institute of Health in the United States, said the Gulf needed to put in place a programme of diabetes screening and public health preventative strategies to identify most at risk members of the community and to intervene through lifestyle changes and drugs.

He said studies by the National Institute of Health in the US showed cases of diabetes could be reduced by over 80 percent if preventative action could be taken at the pre-diabetic stage.

He predicted there would be an increase in different types of diabetes in the future other than type I and 11 and said biomedicine faced a challenge to meet this rise.

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