Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Public Health https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-023-01933-1 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Gender diferential in awareness and risk factors of diabetes among diabetes patients in India Shubham Ranjan 1  · Ramna Thakur 1 Received: 9 December 2022 / Accepted: 3 May 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023 Abstract Aim This study aimed to analyse the gender diferences in diabetes awareness and exposure towards risk factors among patients with diabetes in India. Subject and methods It is a cross-sectional study covering 583 patients with diabetes from diferent districts of Punjab, India. These patients were interviewed using multi-stage purposeful random sampling. Descriptive analysis, along with two sample t-tests for unequal variance and one-way analysis of variance, was used in the study. Results We selected 299 female and 284 male patients, where 47.1% (consisting of 38.2% women and 56.7% men) of patients believed that there is no gender diferential in the prevalence of diabetes. In terms of risk exposure, women were at higher risk in body mass index (51.4%), sitting time per day (89.9%) and physical activity (54.2%). In comparison, men were at higher risk of having irregular diet (4.2%), alcohol (17.3%) and tobacco (5.3%) consumption, family history of diabetes (25.7%) and non-vegetarian food consumption (31.3%). In bivariate analysis, we found a signifcant diference (p = 0.000) in the level of awareness between women (μ = 4.42) and men (μ = 5.56). However, no signifcant diference (p = 0.634) was found between women (μ = 5.04) and men (μ = 5.12) in their exposure towards the risk factors. Conclusions This study has uncovered some underlying reasons for gender diferences in diabetes awareness and expo- sure towards risk factors among patients with diabetes in India. This research will help our policymakers comprehend the intricacies of gender-related health needs and implement interventions to reduce the burden of diabetes in the country. Keywords Gender · Diabetes · Awareness · Risk factors Introduction Diabetes is a severe chronic public health problem that causes mortality and morbidity among people worldwide, including in India (Lin et al. 2020). India is known as the ‘Diabetes Capital of the World’, with an estimated 19.4 mil- lion people afected by the deadly disease, which is expected to rise to 57.2 million by 2025 (Pradeepa et al. 2002; Pandey and Sharma 2018). Although the exact cause of diabetes is unknown, it is apparent that certain social, behavioural, and biological risk factors increase the risk of diabetes (NIH). Some risk factors, such as smoking, drinking, physical inac- tivity, dietary pattern, etc., are modifable; however, age, sex, ethnic background, family history of diabetes, etc., are non-modifable (Rossi 2020). However, it has been observed that by managing modifable risk factors, one can reduce the intensity of the impacts of non-modifable risk factors as well (Metonnou et al. 2020). Out of all risk factors, sex and gender diferentials sig- nifcantly impact the burden of diabetes (Adhikari et al. 2014; de Ritter et al. 2020; Khokhar et al. 2021). Sex is defned as the biological aspects of being female or male. At the same time, gender is defned as a social expression that transforms a female into a woman and a male into a man (Council of Europe n.d). In this line, many studies suggest that biological and social factors are associated with diabetes (Kautzky-Willer et al. 2016; Zhang et al. 2019; Sujata and Thakur 2021). However, biological diferences alone can- not explain health behaviour and its efects. Hence, social * Ramna Thakur ramna@iitmandi.ac.in Shubham Ranjan shubhamranjan1@yahoo.com; d19026@students.iitmandi.ac.in 1 School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, A-14, North Campus, Mandi, Himachal Pradesh PIN-175075, India