Mumbai

Mumbai leads the five metros on elevated blood sugar#

HbA1c is a blood test that reflects average blood sugar over the previous two to three months. Of the 872 Mumbai reports with an HbA1c result, 46.8% are at or above 5.7%, the threshold at which a result falls in the prediabetes or diabetes range. That is the highest share of the five metros, 16.1 points above Bengaluru, and 8.1 points above the 38.7% recorded across all 7,088 HbA1c reports in this report. 17.1% of Mumbai reports are at or above 6.5%, the diabetes-range threshold, against 13.3% report-wide. The Blood Sugar page sets out the thresholds and the report-wide picture in full.

For national context, the ICMR-INDIAB study estimated that 101 million Indian adults had diabetes and 136 million had prediabetes in 2021 (Anjana et al., Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 2023). The shares above describe Loop's tested reports, not the population of any city.

Mumbai's lead is a pooled result across ages, and it does not hold band by band. Pune has the higher share among reports from people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and Hyderabad in the 50s. Mumbai is the highest of the five metros only at 60 and above.

Biomarker figures use report pincodes and available test results.

Mumbai sits above the report-wide blood-sugar share in every displayed adult age band#

The Mumbai share is higher than the report-wide share in all five displayed adult bands, by between 1.6 and 7.8 points, and the difference is widest at 60 and above.

One in five Mumbai reports in the 20-29 band is already elevated, before the steep part of the age curve begins.

Half of Mumbai women's blood-sugar reports are elevated, and half their haemoglobin reports are low#

Haemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen around the body. Mumbai's blood-sugar and haemoglobin results for women come from two separate tests with separate bases.

This analysis classifies haemoglobin below 12 g/dL as low in female reports and below 13 g/dL as low in male reports. These fixed cutoffs do not account for pregnancy or age-specific clinical interpretation. On blood sugar, women's reports carry the higher share report-wide as well as in Mumbai, so this is not a reversal of the wider pattern. What is distinctive about Mumbai is the size of the difference: 5.9 points between women's and men's reports, the largest of the five metros.

On haemoglobin, Mumbai has the highest share of the five metros for both sexes, and Bengaluru the lowest for both. The orderings are not otherwise the same, so the middle of the two tables cannot be read off each other.

The 29.1-point gap between Mumbai and Bengaluru women is larger than the 25.7-point difference between women's and men's reports across the whole tested sample. It rests on 621 Mumbai reports and 1,131 Bengaluru reports. The Anemia page carries the report-wide picture and the age pattern.

The Mumbai result is also not confined to younger women. In each of the five displayed adult bands, Mumbai's share sits above every Bengaluru band, and the highest Mumbai band is 60 and above.

The highest displayed Mumbai band is 60 and above at 60.8%, the next is 30-39 at 57.1%, and the lowest is 50-59 at 42.4%. These are the five displayed adult bands and they do not cover every female report in the city. The comparison shows that the Mumbai excess is present at every displayed age. It does not measure how much of the pooled gap comes from the two cities having different age mixes, and it does not identify anyone's iron status.

78.1% of Mumbai women's HDL reports are below 50 mg/dL#

HDL helps return cholesterol to the liver. A low HDL result is one cardiovascular risk marker, rather than a measure of overall risk. On the female threshold of 50 mg/dL, 78.1% of 442 Mumbai women's HDL reports are below it, against 70.4% of 3,200 women's reports report-wide.

The sex-specific combined rate is 65.7% of 944 reports: it counts women below 50 mg/dL and men below 40 mg/dL. The strict rate is 46.3% of the same 944 reports, applying 40 mg/dL to everyone. The two combined rates use the same reports but different thresholds. The women-only rate uses a different base. The women-only 78.1% is the appropriate figure to set beside WHI 2025's women-only result in the edition comparison below. The Lipids page explains the three measures.

Most Mumbai vitamin D reports are low, despite a lower share than report-wide#

Mumbai is not the highest metro on every marker. Across the nine measures with a report-wide comparator, Mumbai is above it on blood sugar, haemoglobin, ESR and HDL below 40 mg/dL, and below it on liver markers, B12 and vitamin D.

ESR is the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, a broad and non-specific sign of inflammation rather than a test for any one condition, counted here above 20 mm/hr for female reports and above 15 mm/hr for male reports. The Inflammation page sets out what it can and cannot indicate. "Any raised liver marker" means SGPT above 40 U/L, SGOT above 40 U/L or GGT above 60 U/L, and one raised enzyme is enough to count the report, which the Liver page explains.

Vitamin D is the clearest case. At 76.9% of 944 reports below 30 ng/mL, Mumbai is 4.5 points below the report-wide share, and only Delhi NCR of the five metros is lower. Low results are still the majority in all five metros, which is the finding the Vitamin D page carries. These vitamin cutoffs are the ones this report applies in its own analysis rather than clinical diagnostic boundaries, as the Vitamin B12 page sets out.

Mumbai has the highest share of short-sleep answers of the five metros#

The survey is a separate exercise from the laboratory work. It asks working adults about sleep, food, movement, stress, substances and preventive care, and it reports what people said about themselves. Short sleep here means a respondent chose one of the two shortest answer bands offered, "<5 hours" or "5-6 hours". It is not a measurement of hours slept, and someone choosing the second band may be sleeping six.

Mumbai is 9.8 points above Pune at the other end of the five, on 5,476 metro responses in total. Across the whole survey the share is 30.7% of 7,569 responses, which the Sleep page breaks down further.

Mumbai's workday caffeine share is above the report-wide figure, but it is the second highest of the five metros, not the first: Delhi NCR is 82.2% of 998 responses. And Mumbai's high-stress share is below the report-wide figure and fourth of the five metros, with Delhi NCR and Hyderabad both at 41.5%. The Caffeine page covers volume and timing, which this page does not.

“None of these” was an option on a multi-select care question and can overlap with reported care.

Mumbai here means the pincode area, not the island city#

Biomarker reports are assigned to a city by the first three digits of the report pincode. The Mumbai bucket takes the prefixes 400, 401, 410 and 421, which cover Greater Mumbai and the suburbs together with Thane, Navi Mumbai, Kalyan, the Raigad fringe and Vasai-Virar. That is this analysis's reporting bucket rather than a certified municipal boundary. These are not workplaces, not confirmed residences, and not a city population. The survey side uses the city-of-residence answer resolved to "Mumbai", which is a different assignment method in a separate dataset. The records are not linked at the individual level.

The Methodology page has the full source windows, the mapping rules and the processing steps.

What WHI 2025 reported, and what that can and cannot mean#

The 2026 tested sample has an elevated-blood-sugar share 8.6 points higher and a women-only low-HDL share 6.2 points lower. Reported no exercise is close in both editions, at about 35%.

For high stress, WHI 2025 published two Mumbai estimates, 37.7% and 41%, while WHI 2026 records 38.3%. The conflicting earlier estimates do not support a single edition difference.

On the haemoglobin row, both editions found more than half of the Mumbai women they measured below the threshold, on samples drawn separately for the two editions. The WHI 2025 page reports its counts without stating the haemoglobin cutoff it used, so the two rates can be set beside each other as reported classifications but cannot be assumed to share a threshold.

The editions use different city samples, so their differences are not Mumbai health trends.

What to do with a Mumbai result#