World Diabetes Day: high blood sugar climbs in AP and Telangana, NFHS-6 shows

World Diabetes Day falls on Saturday, 14 November, and the newest official count for the two Telugu states finds a larger share of adults with high blood sugar than the previous round did in 2019-21. In Telangana, 24.5% of men aged 15 and above either had a high reading or were already taking medicine to control their sugar. The earlier figure was 18.1%.

The numbers come from the sixth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6), coordinated in 2023-24 by the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, for the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Its state fact sheets are dated May 2026 and describe the results as provisional. Field teams tested random blood glucose in women and men aged 15 and over, and the indicator counts everyone above 140 mg/dl together with those on medicine for blood sugar.

A sharper climb in Telangana

Among Telangana women, the share went up from 14.7% to 19.6%. The gap between town and village is wider among men: 28.9% in urban areas against 23.1% in rural ones. For 13.3% of the state’s men, the reading crossed 160 mg/dl, the band the survey calls very high.

Andhra Pradesh began from a higher base and moved less. Women rose from 19.5% to 21.8%, and men from 21.8% to 24.1%. In the state’s towns, 25.1% of women, or roughly one in four, fell in the group. Across the state, 13.9% of men had a reading above 160 mg/dl.

Both states sit above the all-India figures of 17.8% for women and 20.9% for men. The survey also recorded a rise in overweight and obesity in Andhra Pradesh: 47.9% of women aged 15-49 fell in that bracket, up from 36.3% in the earlier round.

Two years of early action

The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) has picked “Early action on diabetes” as the World Diabetes Day theme for 2026 and 2027. When it announced the choice on 4 March, the federation said almost one in two people living with diabetes worldwide have not been diagnosed, and one in eight people is at high risk of type 2. Catching the disease early, it says, can head off or postpone damage to the heart, kidneys, eyes and nerves.

The World Health Organization has framed its own campaign around the same message of early diagnosis, as Telugu Scope reported on 11 November. The theme carries over to the next World Diabetes Day, on 14 November 2027.