Xu Xinguo, 50, diagnosed with diabetes seven years ago, said with a smile that he no longer needed to take medication for the condition after joining a training programme which helps him adjust his food intake and living habits to fight the disease.

"Many patients are told that they should not eat certain kinds of foods, but that's not the key to problem. In fact, they should make their own plans according to their individual health conditions," Zhao Liebin, a diabetes expert at Ruijin Hospital, affiliated with the Second Medical University, told the Shanghai Star.

Since 1994, Ruijin Hospital established a diabetes centre, an institution for diabetes treatment development, pioneereering education for diabetes patients in the country.

Diabetes is generally classified into types I and II, and traditional treatments for the disease vary according to the type. But doctors have realized that with patients contracting the disease becoming younger, classification needed to improve.

"We should develop different treatment schemes for various patients, but should not refer to their types only," Zhao said.

Ruijin Hospital holds diabetes educational classes for patients and their relatives twice every week, instructing them about the disease, with topics such as how to discover it, protect against it and combat it.

The classes also provide easy environments for patients and their doctors to communicate with each other, helping patients establish more optimistic attitudes towards their illness.

Some hospitals had followed Ruijin in setting up diabetes educational centres that were also proving popular with patients.

More progress

There are many advances in recent years in the development of diabetes treatments.

Researchers at Roche, a Switzerland-based drug maker, discovered recently a new class of drugs which, in preclinical studies, increase the efficiency of an enzyme critical to maintaining the normal balance of glucose in the body.

This discovery represents a potential new treatment for the more than 135 million people who are afflicted with type II diabetes worldwide.

According to the Beijing Times, a team of international scientists have recently discovered a method for the early identification of people at risk of kidney disease.

But Chen Jialun, a professor with Ruijin Hospital said China has 23.8 million diabetes patients today and the number is expected to reach 35 million by 2010.

Statistics from the International Diabetes Federation show that nearly 200 million people around the world suffer from diabetes of both types. The number may rise to exceed 300 million in the next 25 years.

Zhao said that many factors have led to the rising number and the younger age of patients including the fast rhythm of life, the unreasonable dietary patterns with excessive fat and sugar, and the decrease of physical activity combined with overuse of the brain.

(Shanghai Star  January 9, 2004)