Kalpana Sonar, in her suburban apartment, said, “Diabetes, the weight gain, these things shouldn’t have happened.’’ (Namas Bhojani/Bloomberg Markets Magazine)SINGAPORE ? Kalpana Sonar, a 40-year-old mother of two teenage boys, recalls with a grimace how the tingling in her hands and feet began keeping her awake nights in her suburban Mumbai high-rise.
Sonar, who had moved to the four-room apartment six years ago from the city’s Cuffe Parade slum and, before that, a mud hut in the village of Matari, was first treated for high blood pressure and dizziness last October. When her legs started aching and grew numb, her doctor gave her grimmer news: After escaping from childhood hunger and deprivation and joining India’s booming middle class, Sonar now has diabetes ? a disease normally tied to a lifetime of inactivity and overeating.
“Diabetes, the weight gain, these things shouldn’t have happened,’’ Sonar says, dressed in a pink-and-white sari that reveals the small paunch on her 121-pound frame ? a normal weight for her 5-foot height. “Now the illness is here; it isn’t going away.’’
Sonar, a homemaker, says questions swirl through her head: How long will she live, who will take care of the family, and will the boys ? who enjoy soda and computer games ? wind up with diabetes, too? Sonar’s 60-year-old brother and 50- and 55- year-old sisters also have diabetes.
“Your mind starts coming up with all these things,’’ she says in the living room that she and her husband, Prakash Sonar, furnished with a television for their sons. “If something happened to me, what would happen to everybody?’’
More than 50 million Indians are struggling with the same frightening predicament. The International Diabetes Federation in October 2009 ranked India as the country with the most diabetes patients in the world. The umbrella group of more than 200 national associations estimates that the disease will kill about 1 million Indians this year, also more than in any other country.
With 7.1 percent of adults afflicted, India is on a par with developed countries such as Australia, where 7.2 percent of adults have diabetes. India now fares worse than the United Kingdom, where 4.9 percent are diabetic. In the United States, where more than two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, 12.3 percent have diabetes.
Doctors say a twist of science makes Indians susceptible to diabetes and complications such as heart disease and stroke as soon as their living conditions improve. As a decade of 7 percent average annual growth lifts 400 million people into the middle class, bodies primed over generations for poverty, malnutrition, and manual labor are leaving Indians ill-prepared for calorie-loaded food or the cars, TVs, and computers that sap physical activity.
Researchers are finding the pattern begins before birth: Underfed mothers produce small, undernourished babies with metabolisms equipped for deprivation and unable to cope with plenty. Sonar’s mother, a widow who spent her life in a village and raised seven children by doing farm work, was active and healthy into her 70s, Sonar says.
“Diabetes trends in this country are absolutely frightening,’’ says Nikhil Tandon, an endocrinologist at New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
In urban India, Type 2 diabetes, the kind Sonar has, affected 3 percent to 4 percent of adults when Tandon, 46, graduated in the mid-1980s. “Now, it’s 11 or 12 percent,’’ he says. “In some parts of southern India, it’s 18 or 19 percent.’’
Diabetes is also hitting India’s population at an average age of 42.5 years ? about a decade earlier than it strikes people of European origin.
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