Aravindhan Vivekanandhan
University of Madras, India
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Diabetes Metab
Disease dynamics is a complicated phenomenon were in some diseases fall sharply in their incidence to be slowly taken over by others. Recently, such a phenomenon is being documented in India and few other Asian countries. The sharp increase in the incidence of diabetes all throughout the world and especially Asian countries had led to many speculations. Our studies which aimed at looking at the association of filariasis and diabetes have given an inverse relationship between these two seemingly unrelated diseases. Filariasis is a worm infection which spreads through mosquito bites which was once very common in African and Asian counties. India especially, was long identified as a major endemic country for filariasis. However, due to several rounds of mass drug administration, filariasis has become a nightmare of the past. While it is truly a moment of triumph for the public health management, the war is not yet own but has been taken over by a mightier giant- the metabolic diseases. In the past decade, while the incidence of filariasis has steeply fallen, the incidence of diabetes has increased steadily, in India. Our studies clearly indicated that these two events were not due to chance co-incidence but were interlinked. Of course these findings have to be interpreted with caution; since filariasis by itself cannot be a panacea against all metabolic diseases since any such protective effect was not seen against coronary artery disease, a common form of cardiovascular diseases, which is the number one killer disease across the world.
Email: cvaravindhan@gmail.com
