Dr Viswanathan Mohan or more popularly Dr V Mohan, the founder of the eponymous Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities, a leading chain of 50 diabetes care centres in India, is on Thursday, June 20th, receiving two prestigious awards in the US making him the first Indian to be honoured with two prestigious awards in the field of diabetes research.
One of the prestigious awards that he is being honoured with is the Kelly West award for epidemiology. It is one of the highest awards given away by the American Diabetes Association. It is given to an international researcher in recognition of the achievements and contributions made in the field of epidemiology of diabetes. The award is named after Professor Kelly West, considered the father of epidemiology of diabetes. Dr Mohan is the first diabetologist and scientist from India to receive this award. The award includes a lecture at the American Diabetes Association and later published in their journal ‘Diabetes Care’. Delighted at being honoured with this, speaking from the US, he says, the topic of his lecture would be on ‘what have we learnt about the epidemiology of diabetes in South Asians.
The other award is given by the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center. Here, Dr Mohan happens to be its first recipient. “Here, I will be talking about the 20 years of Emory University-Madras Diabetes Research Foundation collaboration,” he says.
Dr Mohan, who founded Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities in 1991, has published several papers and undertaken extensive research on the epidemiology of diabetes and its complications in South Asia. Based out of Chennai, where he conducted the studies before taking it nationwide on diabetes and related non communicable diseases (NCDs) in India. For instance, the ICMR-INDIAB report that was brought out subsequently last year looks at ‘megtabolic non-communicable disease health report of India – a national cross-sectional study.’ He has been actively involved in studies that provide novel data on pathophysiology of diabetes, especially in South Asian, where insulin deficiency seems a bigger problem than insulin resistance. Dr Mohan is currently the US delivering the EGDRC’s (Emory Global Diabetes Research Center) inaugural distinguished lecture.
Chairman of the Madras diabetes, Dr Mohan has always maintained the need to focus on the ailment in India, a country, that he says, has today 101 million diabetes patients and with 136 million prediabetes cases.