One in Five Adults in the UAE Has Diabetes. In Saudi Arabia It Is Closer to One in Four

Start with the numbers, because they are the argument.

The International Diabetes Federation's figures for 2024 put adult diabetes prevalence in the United Arab Emirates at 20.7 per cent, which works out at around 1,274,200 people from an adult population of 7,710,700. Saudi Arabia sits at 23.1 per cent. Globally, the IDF's eleventh Atlas counts 589 million adults living with diabetes.

The Middle East and North Africa carries the highest regional prevalence of any IDF region. This is not a modest local variation. On a per-head basis this region has one of the heaviest diabetes burdens on earth, and it acquired most of it inside a single lifetime.

Why is diabetes so common in the Gulf?

Four factors, of which only the first gets talked about.

The transition happened extraordinarily fast. Most societies moved from scarcity to abundance, from walking to driving, and from manual work to office work across a century or more. Parts of the Gulf did it in about forty years. There are grandparents alive who grew up in an entirely different food and activity environment from their grandchildren. Genes calibrated to one set of conditions met a completely different set inside three generations, with no adjustment period.

The threshold for risk is lower here. This is the part most often missed. Populations from South Asia and the Middle East tend to develop insulin resistance at lower body mass indexes than European-origin populations, with more fat stored viscerally, around the organs, rather than under the skin. The practical consequence is that someone can look unremarkable, sit inside a normal BMI band, and still be metabolically in trouble. Guidance has begun to reflect this: the ADA's 2026 Standards use a BMI threshold of 27.5 rather than 30 for Asian American patients in some recommendations. A person here who is told their weight is fine may be being measured against the wrong yardstick.

The climate removes the default. In much of the world, incidental activity is free. You walk because walking is the obvious way to get somewhere. For a substantial part of the year in the Gulf, outdoor activity in the middle of the day is genuinely unsafe, and the built environment has been designed around that reality. Exercise here has to be a deliberate, scheduled, usually indoor decision, and anything that requires a decision happens less often than something that does not.

Diagnosis comes late. The IDF estimates that roughly 43 per cent of adults with diabetes worldwide are undiagnosed, overwhelmingly type 2. Type 2 is painless for years. Someone can carry it for a decade, accumulating damage to eyes, kidneys and nerves, and discover it only when a complication announces itself. Some of what looks like a treatment problem in regional statistics is actually a detection problem.

Does the demographic mix distort the figures?

It complicates them, and honest analysis has to say so.