The Ministry of Health (MOH), represented by the National Diabetes Awareness Program, has participated last Thursday in the events of the World Diabetes Day at King Abdulaziz University Hospital (KAUH).
This came within the framework of celebrating the World Diabetes Day, which is marked annually on November 14th, with the aim of raising the health awareness among diabetics or anyone at risk of diabetes, as well as providing the best health awareness and education services.
It is noteworthy that the program, targeting diabetics, includes educational and heath awareness events in this domain, with a view to promoting the efforts of services providers towards diabetics. These events include scientific and educational activities by a number of services providers (i.e. physicians and diabetes fe/male educators), in addition to a pavilion to provide all visitors with a bunch of health awareness and education on diabetes, how to deal with diabetes, the risk factors of diabetes and methods of prevention by following the proper health lifestyles. Also counters were set up for offering health awareness and information and publications.
It is worth mentioning that the prevalence of diabetes in the Kingdom amounted to 13.4% (14.8% among men while 11.7% among women), according to the MOH’s latest studies.
The incidence rate of diabetes increases with aging, as it reached 7.8% among people aged 25-34 years, while 50.4% among people aged 65+ years, according to a recent study conducted by the MOH, in collaboration with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington.
According to the study, the incidence rate of pre-diabetes among males amounted to 17% (equivalent to 1.29 million), compared to 15.5% among females (equivalent to 1.1 million). And the total number of diabetics in Saudi Arabia is 1.1 million, of whom 546,000 are receiving a diabetes medication, while there are 275,000 others with uncontrolled diabetes.
The study added that there are 775,000 females with diabetes, of whom 356,000 are receiving diabetes medication, while there are 196,000 others with uncontrolled diabetes.