A five-minute health test can make all the difference

Dubai: Less than five minutes — that's how long it takes to know whether you are at risk of falling prey to a silent killer, a disease most popularly known as diabetes.

Dubai Health Authority (DHA), together with Sanofi Gulf, yesterday announced it will once again set up screening test centres for diabetes that will deliver quick and accurate results for its community members. But this time, it will target government officials right in their offices.

The campaign, held under the patronage of Shaikh Majid Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairman of Dubai Culture, is in its fourth year and will carry on until the end of the year. Free health screenings and discussions on how to prevent diabetes as well as how to better manage diabetes will also be held.

"Educating the community to make lifestyle changes is one of the main challenges facing health care institutions globally," Qadi Saeed Al Murooshid, DHA Director-General, said.

"Unless individuals themselves do not make necessary changes in their diet and exercise patterns, we cannot achieve much in terms of controlling the prevalence of lifestyle diseases and that's where the role of public outreach and advocacy takes centre stage," Al Murooshid added. During the first half of the year, seven government offices were visited. Of the 8,300 people reached, 50 per cent were overweight and nine per cent were diabetic. No new cases of diabetes, however, were recorded.

"The idea of this campaign is to find [diabetic] cases as early as possible. You can prevent [it from becoming full-blown] diabetes if you find them early in the pre-diabetic state," Dr Mohammad Nasr Mahmoud Farghaly, Head of Acute and Chronic Care, Primary Health Care Sector at the DHA, told Gulf News.

In order to control diabetes and its complications, the DHA has been working on a multi-disciplinary strategy by means of training and educating primary health care professionals in diabetes management.

According to the Diabetes Atlas 2011 released by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), the UAE has a diabetes prevalence rate of 19.2 per cent. However, Dr Farghaly said there are many reasons to remain optimistic in the fight against diabetes.

"In 2010, the IDF Diabetes Atlas [lists us] as number two worldwide in the prevalence of diabetes. In the year 2011, we are number ten in the prevalence worldwide. We aim at decreasing it [further]. The target is to reduce the prevalence and to get [UAE] out of this list."