UAE aims to halt rising cost of diabetes treatment

Dubai: The UAE intends to step up its fight against endocrinal diseases and their complications and looks to curb the rising cost of treatment of these ailments.

Three Gulf countries, led by the UAE, are among the top five nations with the highest prevalence of diabetes in 2002, according to the International Diabetes Federation (IDF).

A quarter of Emirati adults in the UAE have diabetes and diet and oral treatment per patient alone costs around Dh3,000 - not counting surgeries and other treatments dealing with diabetic complications.

Dr Mahmoud Fikree, CEO of Health Policies at the Ministry of Health, told Gulf News that 2009 has been earmarked as the year for intervention.

"The strategy will focus on early detection, screening and following up on people identified with pre-diabetes and diabetes. We have been doing that for long, but now we intend to pursue it more aggressively," he said.

He said the diabetes registry database, launched in 2007 but not fully implemented, would help identify those with diabetes and their treatment status. The database, which requires diabetics in the UAE to register, is incomplete as officials had problems classifying patients - be it through their health card numbers, birth dates or names.

ID cards

He said the National Identity Card would help regularise the process for registration.

"Once everyone has the ID, we will be able to identify them through that," Dr Fikree added.

Dr Salah Ahmad Mohammad, public health advisor at the ministry, told Gulf News that the UAE needed to cut down on the diabetes rate to free up funding for other healthcare issues. "Six per cent of the national budget is for health and diabetes is taking a huge chunk out of it," he said.

Part of the strategy is doing a region-wide diabetes prevalence study.

Dr Fikree said the UAE, along with GCC countries, would do the study to find out the prevalence rate of diabetes in the region. He said the findings of the study would be reported to the IDF. However, he did not specify when the study would be conducted, saying it would only be done when all the countries would be ready.

Diabetes is a major cause of deaths in the UAE, with 31 per cent attributed to the disease, followed by cancer and road accidents.