HONG KONG (AFP) -– China now has a diabetes “epidemic” as obesity rates rise, a study warned Thursday, with one in 10 adults in the rapidly developing nation suffering from a disease already rampant in the West.

The study in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 92 million men and women are living with diabetes in China, or almost 10 percent of adults in the world's largest population of 1.3 billion people.
“Our results indicate that diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the general adult population in China,” said the study carried out by 20 Chinese researchers.
“Given its large population, China may bear a higher diabetes-related burden than any other country,” it said.
The study said another 148 million people were considered to be pre-diabetic, or showing early symptoms of developing diabetes, a condition that can lead to cardiovascular disease, China's leading cause of death.
The report added that most cases of diabetes in China remained undiagnosed.
By comparison, according to the American Diabetes Association, the worldwide prevalence of diabetes for all age groups was estimated to be 2.8 percent in 2000, rising to 4.4 percent in 2030.
That would take the number of diabetes sufferers worldwide from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million in 2030. In the United States, 24 million people or eight percent of the population had diabetes in June 2008, official data show.
As China's economic growth outpaced the rest of the world's, so has the increase in health problems linked to growing prosperity, according to the Chinese researchers.
Since China's economic boom went into high gear in the 1980s, millions of people have left the countryside for jobs in cities -- ditching bicycles for cars and embracing aspects of Western living such as fast-food joints.
“In the last 10 years, with the country's economy expanding quickly and people's standard of living improving, people's lifestyles have changed,” said Yang Wenying, one of the report's 20 authors, who is head of endocrinology at Beijing's China-Japan Friendship Hospital,
“China's economic development has gone from a situation of not being able to eat enough, of poverty, to having enough food and warm clothes, and doing much less exercise,” she told AFP.
The Chinese study was based on a representative sample of more than 46,000 adults aged 20 years or older from 14 provinces and municipalities.
As well as carrying out tests approved by the World Health Organization for diabetes, researchers also questioned respondents on lifestyle habits such as smoking, alcohol intake, dietary habits and physical activity.
It found that the effects associated with the rapid pace of growth in the world's third largest economy were a driving factor in the spread of diabetes.
“The aging of the population, urbanization, nutritional changes, and decreasing levels of physical activity, with a consequent epidemic of obesity, have probably contributed to the rapid increase,” the report said.
There are more than 60 million obese people in China, and another 200 million who are overweight, according to a Chinese health ministry statement in November that cited a 2004 nationwide survey.
Previous studies of diabetes carried out in China since the 1980s had also found a marked increase but were not comparable because of variations in sampling and definitions of the disease, the study said.