38% of people over 30 in KSA are diabetics

RIYADH: Around 38 percent of people aged 30 and above in the Kingdom suffer from diabetes and concerted efforts are being made to fight the disease, Dr. Hisham Al-Khashan, the assistant deputy minister of health for primary health care centers, has said.
Speaking at a campaign launched on the occasion of World Diabetic Day on Thursday, he said that around 90 percent of patients have type two of the disease. “Poor eating habits, lack of physical exercise and obesity are the main causes of the disease.”
The event, organized by the Health Ministry in collaboration with Abbott Company under the motto “Sahsehlo (Beware of diabetes)” at the King Abdullah Park, was attended by senior Health Ministry officials, physicians, families and individuals.
“As an enormous responsibility for the situation of diabetes in the country, the ministry has established the national program for awareness on diabetes,” he said. “The program, launched a few years ago, is aimed at educating patients the side effects of the disease and ways to control it, enabling them to properly use medical devices to monitor their condition,” he said.
Al-Khashan said that diabetes is a chronic disease that forms over a long period of time due to a number of factors. Hence, the cooperation of people and the entire community is critical for combating it.
“Although the ministry is doing its best to face the disease, we still experience a severe shortcoming because of the lack of qualified medical personnel for handling diabetes in our health care centers,” he said.
“To solve this problem, the Health Minister has issued directives to all departments to hire the best consultant physicians at primary health care centers in major cities by attracting them with competitive salaries so their centers can work as referral, benchmark, and training centers in handling diabetes. This will help in training even more Saudis so that we are able to post them to centers suffering from a lack of qualified diabetes doctors,” said Al-Khashan.
Dr. Fatima Yosuf Al-Saleel, the director of the National Program for combating diabetes, told reporters that diabetes is still a hidden epidemic in the Kingdom as many people remain untested for the disease. “Preventing or even simply delaying the disease is possible by taking simple measures in terms of improving one’s lifestyle. These measures include maintaining a healthy weight, taking physical exercises for at least 30 minutes, three to four days a week; following a healthy diet consisting mostly of vegetables and fruits, and decreasing the intake of sugars and unhealthy fats as much as possible,” she said.