With smart holograms, there is no instrument. It’s just your smartphone. And soon, almost everyone will have one of those.
- Chris Lowe
It’s the middle of the afternoon. You hear the trill of an incoming text message on your phone. You pick it up, expecting
it to be from a friend.
Skipping breakfast will make you overeat at lunch.
Ah yes, this must be from Professor Ambady Ramachandran. You’ve never met him and he doesn’t know you personally, but he has sent you this helpful reminder because you are one of over 20 million Indians at a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Tomorrow, you tell yourself, you will make sure you eat before going to work.
“It seems paradoxical that something as simple as text messaging could help prevent you from developing diabetes,” says Professor Nick Wareham, Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. And yet, the evidence suggests it might work.
In 2013, Ramachandran, who founded and runs a diabetes hospital in Chennai, India, and is President of the India Diabetes Research Foundation, reported the results of a study that found almost a third fewer men in the high risk group went on to develop diabetes if they received between two and four texts a week giving advice on diet and exercise.
“This is a big – and surprising – effect,” says Wareham. And India, as with many other countries worldwide, needs something big (and, possibly, surprising) to help it tackle the growing burden of diabetes and obesity. Recent estimates suggest there are 68 million people living with diabetes in India, the majority with type 2 diabetes. A mixture of poor diet and lack of exercise, low birth weight followed by rapid growth, and genetic predisposition – Indians tend to develop diabetes at a lower body-mass index than Caucasians – means that diabetes is twice as common in India as it is in the UK.
While targeted strategies aimed at high risk individuals are likely to be effective, there is no way they could be rolled out to 20 million people, says Wareham. “If you had to individually counsel that many people, it would be unaffordable. Simple, pragmatic, scalable approaches are the only ones that are feasible.”
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Image: mobile-mobile
Credit: James Theophane
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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