Awareness campaigns on lifestyle changes often go over the head as doctors may not be emphasising them enough. The ongoing three-day International Diabetes Update 2016, organised by Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes Education Academy, aims at doing just that.
The focus of this year’s event is monogenic diabetes — single gene mutation that could be responsible for onset of diabetes. Endocrinologist and professor of medicine Louis Philipson who discovered the insulin gene mutations that result in neonatal diabetes set the theme with the Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes Education Academy gold oration on ‘Personalised genetic medicine for diabetes’.
V. Mohan, chairman, Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities Centre, said the aim was to send home the message that it was all about going back to basics.
Although environmental factors played an important part, genes are a crucial factor. A family history of the patient was enough to arrive at the risk for diabetes in a patient.
In India, data about diabetes is available from 1972, when 1 to 2 per cent of the population had diabetes. Now, 25 per cent of the population had the condition. The data could be used to identify the possibility of a dominant gene for diabetes being handed down in families, he said.
Basic steps
Sometimes doctors need to be retold the importance of basic steps.
Doctors should write out a prescription specifying “Diet as advised and Exercise” as the first point of treatment instead of focusing on medicines, Dr. Mohan said.
“The cheapest drug Sulfonylureas and Metformin that have since been discarded for more expensive tablets is still the best,” he said and added that patients who had been prescribed only Sulfonylureas had lived for 50 years.
