India is all set to lead the diabetes research in the world, Union Minister for Science & Technology Dr Jitendra Singh said on Saturday.

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Delivering the inaugural address at the 3-day World Diabetes Meet, Singh, who is also a renowned Diabetologist, said India has a huge resource pool of patients with different manifestations of diseases at different stages and at the same time there was no dearth of calibre, capacity and acumen on the part of Indian researchers.

”It is, therefore, the right time to generate as much Indian data as possible because the goal should be to develop Indian treatment regimens for Indian patients, Indian solutions for Indian problems,” he said.

He said this was also important because the Indian phenotype was different from the Westerners and the genetic preponderance was also quite different.

Citing research evidence, Singh said it has now been proven beyond doubt that the Indian-origin diaspora living in European countries for several generations still continue to have a higher preponderance to develop Type 2 diabetes mellitus even though they were no longer living in India and the environmental conditions they were living in was different.

Referring to some of the important risk factors prevalent in Indians, he said that India’s central obesity profile was also different from others. For example, in India, the prevalence of central obesity was high and almost equal in both males and females whereas, in the western population, the individual might be apparently looking obese but has general visceral fat, he said.

Lauding the Modi government for the priority given to healthcare, Singh said that it was because of the personal interest and intervention of the Prime Minister that within two years, India not only managed the Covid pandemic but also succeeded in coming out with a DNA vaccine and providing it to other countries as well.

Referring to Prime Minister Modi’s support of indigenous medical research, he said the time has come to integrate traditional Indian knowledge with modern scientific inferences and also to seek a synergy of different systems of medicine, including Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy for optimum and maximum benefits in the control and prevention of diabetes.