Study details

For the study, researchers from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington analyzed data from more than 27,000 sources in 204 countries and territories. Currently, there are 529 million people in the world with diabetes, but researchers project that number will more than double to roughly 1.3 billion by 2050.

The majority of these cases will be type 2 diabetes, the researchers said. They found that around 96% of people worldwide with diabetes in 2021 had type 2 and noted the increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes is "primarily due to a rise in obesity."

According to the study, some countries and regions are expected to see larger increases in diabetes patients than others. For example, prevalence rates in 2050 are projected to hit 16.8% in North Africa and the Middle East, and 11.3% in Latin America and the Caribbean, compared to a 9.8% global diabetes rate.

What can be done to curb the rise of diabetes

Editors of The Lancet in an accompanying editorial said that diabetes "will be a defining disease of this century."

"How the health community deals with diabetes in the next two decades will shape population health and life expectancy for the next 80 years," the editor wrote. "The world has failed to understand the social nature of diabetes and underestimated the true scale and threat the disease poses."

While new drugs, including GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, are highly effective for obesity and diabetes, addressing the threat of diabetes worldwide will require not just medical interventions but also changes to the environments people live in, the editors wrote.

"The excitement and utility surrounding GLP-1 agonists and newer drug combinations that help to control blood sugar as well as reduce body weight is understandable," they wrote, but added that "the solution to unhealthy and unfair societies is not more pills but to re-evaluate and re-imagine our lives to provide opportunities to tackle racism and injustice, and to prevent the major social drivers of disease."

The editors also noted that "addressing structural racism must become a core component of preventive strategies and health promotion — areas that invariably receive too little investment."

"Structural inequities really lie at the heart of the global diabetes crisis that we have and for generations to come," said Shivani Agarwal, lead author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. If people don't pay attention to diabetes rates now, "we will be in a really tough spot for ourselves and for our children and their children," he added.

Liane Ong, first author on the paper and lead research scientist at IHME, said the "rapid rate at which diabetes is growing is not only alarming but also challenging for every health system in the world."

"For a disease where there is a significant amount of financial investment — certain countries spend a lot of money and there are definitely industries that spend a lot of effort and energy — it seems like something is amiss," Ong said. "The way that we've been trying to tackle this condition maybe needs to be re-thought of and reframed." (Rigby, Reuters, 6/22; Searing, Washington Post, 7/10; Chen, STAT, 6/22)

As diabetes and obesity heightened individuals’ risk for severe COVID-19, the pandemic placed an outsized spotlight on these diseases over the last two years. Download our report to get strategic insights on four key drivers reshaping the delivery of diabetes and obesity care.