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Australian diabetes researchers have begun the world's first national study of the health burden and cost of diabetes and obesity.
Diabetes and associated illnesses costs Australia more than $3 billion annually.
The study will provide critically needed information on the socio-economic impact of diabetes in both the general and indigenous communities.
A grant of $2.6 million by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) had enabled the research, Professor Paul Zimmet, director of Melbourne's International Diabetes Institute, said.
The project, which began on January 1, was even more important with the recent publication in a US journal of data showing a rise of 74% in the obesity of Americans, Zimmet said.
Obesity trends in Australia were similar to those in America, Zimmet said.
The Australian research would build on a national diabetes study of 11,000 people over a year ago, and would take place over five years, he said.
It would be the first long-term study done on the problem among Australians, Zimmet said.
The institute, a world-leading centre for diabetes epidemiology and public health research, will get the grant over four years to study the health and economic costs of diabetes, obesity and kidney disease in Australia.
The money will fund the largest project into diabetes ever conducted in Australia and one of the first in the world to determine the national health burden of diseases triggered by diabetes such as kidney, eye and heart disease.
Professor Robert Atkins, Director of Nephrology at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, said the study would have international significance as one of the first to examine the national burden of diabetes.
Atkins - who is also the president of the International Society of Nephrology - said he believed that the project would be one of the first national studies anywhere in the world to assess the burden of diabetes complications such as kidney, eye and cardiovascular diseases.
The study will be undertaken with the support of several state governments, Diabetes Australia and a large consortium of pharmaceutical companies in Australia.
The US study - published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association - revealed startling increases in obesity.
The percentage of Americans obese in 2001 was 20.9, up from 19.8% in the year 2000.
And there was an 8% rise in diagnosed cases of diabetes - linked to overweight and poor lifestyle.
By 2001 the disease affected 7.9% of the US population.
Obesity is defined by weight and height: 78 kilograms and above is obese in someone 160 centimetres tall while a person of 190 centimetres is obese at 109 kilograms.
© AAP
