Diabetes is a metabolic condition, and treating it properly means understanding the whole system it belongs to: how well your body responds to insulin, where it stores fat, and what your blood pressure and cholesterol are doing. Our endocrinologists in Dubai and Abu Dhabi assess that full picture and explain what your results mean.

The blood sugar conditions we treat

Endocare’s endocrinologists treat four related conditions as part of our full range of endocrine and metabolic services. Patients often move between them over time.

Type 2 diabetes

The most common form. Your body still produces insulin but no longer responds to it well enough to keep blood sugar in a healthy range. It develops over years, and many patients feel perfectly well while it does.

Prediabetes

Blood sugar above the normal range but below the threshold for diabetes. This is the stage at which the most can still be changed, and the stage most often missed, because it produces no symptoms.

Insulin resistance

A state in which your cells respond poorly to insulin, so the pancreas produces more of it to hold blood sugar steady. It frequently appears before any blood sugar test turns abnormal.

Hypoglycemia

Blood sugar that falls too low, generally below 70 mg/dL (3.9 mmol/L). It can cause shakiness, sweating, confusion, a fast heartbeat or a sudden loss of concentration. It can affect patients taking insulin or certain diabetes medicines, and it can also occur in patients without diabetes.

If you experience these symptoms repeatedly, or if an episode leaves you unable to treat yourself, seek medical advice immediately.

How diabetes is diagnosed

Diabetes is diagnosed on blood tests, not on symptoms, and our blood test panels cover the markers below. The test used most often is HbA1c, which reflects your average blood sugar over approximately the previous three months. A single high reading on a home glucose meter diagnoses nothing.

These thresholds come from the American Diabetes Association. A diagnosis is confirmed on a repeat test unless blood sugar is unequivocally high. Your endocrinologist reads these numbers alongside the rest of your results, because two patients with the same HbA1c can need different treatment.

The International Diabetes Federation puts adult diabetes prevalence in the UAE at 20.7%, and the IDF Diabetes Atlas estimates that 42.8% of adults with diabetes worldwide have never been diagnosed.

What diabetes treatment looks like at Endocare

Your first consultation

Endocare strongly prefers your first consultation to take place in person. Your endocrinologist takes a full history, reviews your existing results, examines you and runs a body composition analysis. You then meet the lifestyle coach and our clinical nutritionist who will work with you afterwards.

A blood test performed within the last three months is required before any medication is prescribed. If your results are older than that, we arrange the tests first.

The tests we run

Diabetes is rarely the only thing happening. Alongside HbA1c and fasting glucose, your endocrinologist reviews kidney and liver function, cholesterol and triglycerides, thyroid function and weight and your nutritional markers.

The body composition analysis is a multi-frequency bio-impedance scan reporting body fat percentage, visceral fat rating, skeletal muscle mass and body water. It is included free of charge with every consultation, for every patient, on every visit. Visceral fat, stored around the organs, is strongly linked to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, and a weighing scale cannot show it to you.

Your monthly follow-ups

You are seen every month. At each follow-up your endocrinologist repeats the body composition analysis, reviews how your blood sugar has behaved, and decides with you whether anything needs to change. Laboratory tests are scheduled at set intervals rather than left until something goes wrong.

That cadence means a treatment that is not working is caught in weeks rather than at an annual check.

The treatments used in type 2 diabetes care

Treatment for type 2 diabetes is built in layers. Nutrition, movement, sleep and weight are the foundation, and medication is added on top of it rather than in place of it.

Several classes of medicine are used. Metformin has been the long-standing first step, and NICE guidance on type 2 diabetes now recommends SGLT2 inhibitors alongside it for many adults, particularly those with heart or kidney disease. GLP-1 receptor agonists and the newer dual agonists act on appetite and blood sugar together. Insulin is used when the body no longer produces enough of its own.

Which of these suits you is a clinical decision your endocrinologist makes with you, based on your results, your other conditions and how you respond.

Weight and blood sugar are usually the same problem, so patients whose diabetes sits alongside obesity are assessed for both at the first visit.

Prediabetes, insulin resistance and hypoglycemia

Prediabetes is a warning rather than a diagnosis of diabetes, and it is the point at which treatment has the most to work with, including the weight loss options for prediabetes we set out separately. Losing weight and treating the insulin resistance underneath it can bring blood sugar back into the normal range for many patients.

Insulin resistance often does the damage long before anything shows on a blood sugar test, and weight loss injections can help insulin resistance directly. It travels with excess visceral fat, raised triglycerides, higher blood pressure and fatty liver, a cluster doctors call metabolic syndrome, and treating it improves more than one number at a time.

Hypoglycemia is investigated rather than assumed. Your endocrinologist looks at when the episodes happen, what you had eaten and what medicines you take, because the cause determines the fix. Where diabetes treatment is causing it, the adjustment is one your doctor makes.

Can type 2 diabetes go into remission?

For some patients, yes. Remission is not the same as a cure, and the distinction matters. The international consensus definition, agreed by the American Diabetes Association, the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, Diabetes UK and the Endocrine Society, is an HbA1c below 6.5% measured at least three months after stopping glucose-lowering medication.

The DiRECT trial remains the clearest evidence. In that study 46% of participants in the intervention group achieved remission at 12 months, compared with 4% of those receiving standard care, and those who lost the most weight were the most likely to reach it. The ADA and EASD consensus describes weight loss of 10 to 15% or more as disease-modifying.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. Remission is not available to every patient, and it depends on how long you have had diabetes and how much insulin your pancreas still produces. It can also be lost, so monitoring continues.

How your progress is monitored

HbA1c is generally checked every three to six months until your treatment is stable, and every six months once it is, which matches the recommended monitoring intervals. Between those tests, your monthly appointment tracks the things that move faster: body composition, blood pressure, symptoms and how you are managing day to day.

We spend part of every appointment explaining what has changed and why. Patients tell us repeatedly that they left previous appointments with a new prescription and no understanding of their own results.

Which doctor treats diabetes in the UAE

This is the question patients ask most often, and the answer is less complicated than the job titles suggest. Three routes are equally valid: an endocrinologist, a diabetologist, or a general practitioner specialized in metabolic health. You can also meet the care team before booking.

An endocrinologist is a doctor who has specialized in the hormone system, which includes the pancreas, thyroid and adrenal glands. Because diabetes is a hormonal and metabolic condition, an endocrinologist treats the blood sugar and the conditions that travel with it. A diabetologist has specialized specifically in diabetes care. A general practitioner who has built real expertise in metabolic health treats diabetes as their day-to-day work, and in UAE private practice all three titles overlap a great deal.

What matters more than the title is how much diabetes the doctor treats and how closely they follow you. Deeper specialist input helps when your HbA1c will not come down, when you take several medicines at once, when other conditions are in play, or when nobody has explained your numbers to you.

Dr Hecham Harb, Endocare’s Medical Director and Consultant Endocrinologist, holds a specialty certificate in Endocrinology and Diabetes from the Royal Colleges of Physicians in the United Kingdom, with more than 20 years of international experience.

Diabetes care in Dubai and Abu Dhabi

Endocare treats diabetes at two clinics. In Dubai we are at Building 27, Block B, Unit 504 B, Dubai Healthcare City, on +971 4 285 3885. In Abu Dhabi we are at Al Bateen, Tower C2, Unit 104, on +971 2 582 6178. Follow-up appointments are booked at whichever clinic is easier for you to reach, and our full pricing is set out on a separate page.