The Relationship between Population Aging and Macroeconomic Changes to the Growth in Global Diabetes Prevalence between 1990 and 2008

Nikkil Sudharsanan, University of Pennsylvania
Mohammed Ali, Emory University
K. M. Venkat Narayan, Emory University

The prevalence of diabetes has grown over the past decades as populations age; yet, the relative contribution of population aging is uncertain. We quantify the growth in the global prevalence of diabetes between 1990 and 2008 for people aged 20 to 100, and identify the contribution of aging and macroeconomic changes to this growth. We used published data on age and sex specific diabetes prevalence, age and sex specific population counts, and macroeconomic indicators for 193 countries. Decomposition analysis was performed to assess the contribution of aging to the growth in global diabetes prevalence; the effect of macroeconomic changes was examined using first-difference rank correlations. Globally, diabetes prevalence grew by 1.95% points with only 19.17% of the growth attributable to population aging. We find little evidence that macroeconomic changes and urbanization had any impact on the growth in diabetes not attributable to population aging over this period.