Diabetes is one of the major health crises facing the world today with around 370 million people suffering from the blood disorder. The disease is the focus of an enormous amount of medical research but a new study has revealed that the majority of those research projects are examining drug therapies and only one in 10 is aimed at looking at disease prevention.
The most common form of diabetes is type 2, the development of which can be prevented through diet and other health measures. And as there is no cure for any form of diabetes, the concern is that not enough attention is being paid to preventative or care measures that could change lifestyle behaviour and stop the disease developing.
Researchers from Duke University Medical Centre, in North Carolina, carried out an evaluation of the current diabetes research projects being undertaken around the world with the results published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
The Duke team looked at almost 2,500 diabetes-related trials started since 2007 and found that 75% of research projects focused on treating the disease with 63% examining drug or medical therapies. However, only 12% were set up to evaluate the behavioural strategies that can help manage the disease. The study also showed that children and older people are generally excluded from new research into the disease, although both of those groups could benefit greatly from new methods of disease management.
The study concluded that diabetes trials should widen their focus to include patients in all age groups to improve clinical care.