Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service, coming to you live from London. I'm Paul Henley.

Diabetes has long been a health scourge of some of the world's wealthiest countries. Since 1990, new research suggests that the number of cases has doubled globally, and developing countries

are showing the biggest increases. The name diabetes is given to a group of chronic diseases

characterised by high blood sugar levels suffered by more than 10% of adults worldwide. It can lead

to serious health issues and death if it goes untreated.

The most common type, type 2, is often associated with lower-income people who have less than healthy diets.

Dr. Majid Ezati from the Global Environmental Health Programme at Imperial College London

is senior author of the new research.

He told me this scale of diabetes was an avoidable crisis.

So diabetes is increasingly manageable.

We're detecting it early and using effective treatments

and getting the patients to hopefully supporting them to change their diet.

Our study shows that for much of the world's population,

actually they are not getting the treatment,

and that's happening because they are not even getting the diagnosis that they need.

So a large number of people living with diabetes for years, which means that it's going to affect just about every organ in their body and lead to early death and a lot of disability.

And it's an uneven increase, isn't it, across developed and developing countries?

It is really uneven and a part of it is across developed and developing countries

and a part of it is just a particular region of the world.

So in Europe, especially in Northern Europe, there has been just about no increase

except for people getting older.

So generally, diabetes rates are higher in older ages.

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