Europe 'must tackle burden of diabetes'

Diabetes and other chronic diseases are putting "mounting pressure" on Europe's health sector, Danish European affairs minister Nicolai Wammen has warned.

Wammen was speaking at a Parliament Magazine debate, co-organised by Novo Nordisk in association with the London School of Economics (LSE), which looked at reducing the burden of diabetes in Europe.

Wammen said that the "Danish presidency has decided to focus on chronic disease care and innovation in member states, the EU and on the global stage".

The Danish minister felt that it was important to push the EU and global aspect as the "challenges are common and closely interconnected".

"These days, all conversations are about economic and statistics, but the EU is about far more than that," he told participants in the debate in the European parliament.

"Dreams can come true and we can make better lives for our citizens. We're living longer - this is good, but more Europeans are contracting type II diabetes and chronic diseases.

"The Danish presidency wants to use diabetes as a test case. A European solution to chronic disease care would have huge export potential."

The event was hosted by Danish S&D deputy Christel Schaldemose, who said that she had been working hard to put diabetes "higher on the agenda", adding that it would be used as a role model for other chronic diseases.

"We need a horizontal view, as well as a special view focusing on individual diseases," she said.

A preventable disease

Panos Kanavos, who authored the LSE's study on diabetes expenditure, burden of disease and management, said that the "prevalence of diabetes is high" and that policymakers must "take stock and look at the implications".

Diabetes incurs direct costs of €90bn per year in the study countries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, said Kanavos, who added that "indirect costs are included for the first time in a study of this kind".

"Type II diabetes is potentially the most preventable of chronic diseases," he said, but stressed that diabetes care suffered from insufficient human resources, poor funding of lifestyle change initiatives, and inadequate physician training.

"The key cost driver is complications associated with diabetes - renal care and optical problems", and these use a lot of resources and require the use of an evidence-based approach.

At the EU level, Kanavos called for the institutions to "coordinate and support" member states and establish "criteria for standardised data" on diabetes.

"It's high time we thought about establishing a European diabetes observatory," he said.

Martin Soeters, the president of Novo Nordisk Europe, told the debate that "greater emphasis" should be placed on detection of diabetes and also the quality of care for sufferers.

Pointing out that only 14 of the EU's 27 member states currently have a national diabetes programme - "many of them old" - he also said there was a need for "real, hard data" on the prevalence of the disease.

He welcomed the fact that in 2010, two member states, Hungary and the Czech Republic, became the latest to introduce national programmes, saying, "This was a very important initiative and is something the European parliament can help with in providing the necessary stimulus.

He said diabetes had an impact in "human, social and economic" terms and was a disease which kills some 350,000 people every year in Europe, including 3000 in Denmark alone.

"These figures are very alarming," said Dutch-born Soeters, who has held his current post since 2008.

He also focused on the estimated six million patients in Europe who go undiagnosed, often leading to complications in their condition.

Raising awareness

Another keynote speaker, Leszek Czupryniak, of the European Association for Diabetes Studies, provided the clinicians' viewpoint.

Describing diabetes as "unique", he said that, while cancer was more deadly, diabetes was a "chronic and incurable" disease which shortens life.

"It causes absenteeism and forced early retirement from work, blindness and its symptoms can go undetected "for years".

He called for an EU-wide public education campaign to help raise awareness of the disease, saying, "Despite it being a unique disease many patients still do not think it is serious. They seem to think that taking a tablet a day is enough. We need the public to be made aware of just how serious diabetes is."

More optimistically, Czupryniak said that with sufficient effort at EU and member state level, he "strongly believes" the prevalence of diabetes can be substantially reduced over the next 10-20 years.

Outlining the economic burden of the disease, Chris Delicata, president of International Diabetes Federation (IDF Europe) branded diabetes as a "huge and growing epidemic."

"The message I want to convey is that it should not be underestimated or ignored," he told the conference.

The Maltese official was also critical of the "slow progress" in developing national action plans to tackle diabetes, saying the current number of such programmes was "unacceptably low."

"Monitoring, prevention and reducing the risk factors should be the buzzwords," he said.