{"id":266648,"date":"2018-10-18T10:30:21","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T14:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/national-strategy-needed-to-tackle-canadas-diabetes-epidemic\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T22:16:58","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:16:58","slug":"national-strategy-needed-to-tackle-canadas-diabetes-epidemic","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2018\/10\/national-strategy-needed-to-tackle-canadas-diabetes-epidemic\/","title":{"rendered":"National strategy needed to tackle Canada\u2019s diabetes epidemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Frederick Banting discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921, he saved the lives of millions of people with type 1 diabetes, which up until that time killed all its sufferers, usually within a year. As someone who has lived with the disease and lost close family members to complications of its other form \u2014 type 2 \u2014 I am hugely grateful to Dr. Banting and his team for their discovery. In 1921, though, diabetes was a much less common disease than it is now. In fact, the number of people in Canada with diabetes has doubled<\/em> since 1980<\/a> alone.<\/p>\n

Today, one in three Canadians lives with prediabetes or diabetes<\/a>. More than half of the Canadians who are 20 years old today will develop the disease in their lifetime<\/a>. For First Nations peoples in Canada, that risk is up to 80 percent and in some subgroups within this population, it is even higher. And at the rate we\u2019re going, according to the International Diabetes Federation<\/a>, the cost to our health care system (to say nothing of the cost in human suffering) will top $39 billion within a decade. This year\u2019s cost to Canada\u2019s health care system is expected to be more than $27 billion.<\/p>\n

While extensive effort is being made to address this epidemic, what we are doing now is not working. We do not have a coordinated or comprehensive enough approach or policies in place to address the complex issues involved. Currently, each of the provinces and territories works on diabetes in its own way, which has not facilitated economies of scale or rapid knowledge-sharing and results in a patchwork approach to prevention and treatment and great health inequities for people with diabetes across Canada. We urgently need a national diabetes strategy to improve the prevention and management of diabetes in Canada. The federal government has a unique opportunity to create a partnership of governments, civil society and private sector to implement that strategy.<\/p>\n

Diabetes is a metabolic disorder in which the body either cannot produce insulin or cannot properly use the insulin it produces. There are two main types of diabetes: type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition that causes the body not to produce insulin, and type 2 diabetes, which occurs when the body does not make enough insulin or cannot properly use the insulin it produces. This used to be a type of diabetes exclusively experienced by adults, but increasingly (and alarmingly) it is developing in children.<\/p>\n

Additionally, there\u2019s a precursor condition known as prediabetes. Prediabetes refers to blood glucose levels that are higher than normal, but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes. Nearly 50 percent of those with prediabetes will go on to develop type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n

According to the World Health Organization 2016 Global Report on Diabetes<\/a>, globally, the number of adults living with diabetes has quadrupled since 1980, from just over 100 million to more than 400 million. In 2012, the disease directly caused 1.5 million deaths, and elevated blood glucose levels linked to diabetes were responsible for an additional 2.2 million deaths that year.<\/p>\n

Many people, including policy-makers, don\u2019t think diabetes is a particularly serious disease, which illustrates how much is truly unknown and may be contributing to the slow response. There is a lack of understanding that diabetes-related complications can be serious and life-threatening, adding to the health care and economic costs of the disease. For example, people with diabetes account for<\/a> 30 percent of strokes, 40 percent of heart attacks, 50 percent of kidney failure requiring dialysis and 70 percent of amputations in Canada each year. The life expectancy of a person with diabetes is shortened by an average of 13 years.<\/p>\n

Something must change, urgently. Canada has an unprecedented opportunity to implement innovative policy and exercise global leadership with bold action on diabetes, paralleling what Finland, Sweden, Denmark, India and other progressive countries have done. These countries have brought together all levels of government and created public-private partnerships to implement nationwide strategies to tackle diabetes and, critically, measurement systems to gauge their impact, enabling them to start to lower the prevalence of diabetes in their countries.<\/p>\n

A Canadian national diabetes strategy would set out specific outcomes, against which progress could be measured to ensure the accountability of our health care system and to monitor the efficacy of the strategy. Recognizing this, beginning in late 2017, Diabetes Canada has convened nearly 120 individuals representing 100 national stakeholder organizations to build the framework for a new national diabetes strategy, which we are calling Diabetes 360\u02da<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This flexible framework \u2014 modelled on the proven, ambitious \u201c90-90-90\u201d approach used for HIV\/AIDS and other global disease prevention and management strategies \u2014 can deliver results in just seven years by focusing on the following key targets and corresponding examples of strategies that, if implemented, could meet these targets.<\/p>\n