Public Health France also notes that in these regions, women are the majority among people suffering from this metabolic disease.
A disease closely followed in the overseas departments. The rate of people with type 2 diabetes is twice as high as in France, according to a report from Public Health France (SPF) published Tuesday, November 14, on the occasion of World Diabetes Day.
This type of diabetes – to be differentiated from type 1, linked to a genetic predisposition – occurs “generally manifests after 40 years”. It is also the most frequently diagnosed (90% of cases of diabetes), recalls Inserm, which specifies that “nutritional imbalances and a sedentary lifestyle are increasingly contributing to the ‘spread'” of this disease. It is estimated that nearly 4 million people are affected in France.
According to the SPF study, in 2021, the rates of adults with diabetes were 13.6% in Reunion, 12% in Guadeloupe, 11.6% in Guyana and 11.5% in Martinique, “while this proportion was 5.7% in 2016 in mainland France”. Public Health France also reveals that women represent 59% of people with diabetes in Guadeloupe and Martinique, 57% in Guyana, 54% in Reunion, compared to 45% in France.
More frequent hospitalizations
In addition, complications due to diabetes are more common overseas. Among people with diabetes, “hospitalizations for lower limb amputations were, respectively 1.5 and 1.3 times more frequent in Martinique and Reunion, in 2021 compared to the whole of France”, reports SPF. As for hospitalizations for chronic end-stage renal failure, they were “twice as frequent in Martinique, 1.7 times in Reunion, 1.6 in Guyana and 1.3 in Guadeloupe”.
How can we explain such disparities? “The discovery in Guyana and Reunion Island of type 2 diabetes in younger people of smaller build raises questions about the possible existence of genetic or epigenetic susceptibility,” notes François Bourdillon, former director general of SPF, in an editorial accompanying the study. And this, all the more so since the study proves, in Reunion, a “certain stability of risk factors” such as obesity, high blood pressure, low consumption of fruits and vegetables, insufficient physical activity or even excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco.
Finally, the public health specialist recalls “that overseas food products are deliberately sweeter than in France”while the Hurel law, passed in 2013, was to guarantee that the quantity of added sugars in products sold in overseas departments is not greater than that of products placed on the market in France.