One out of every two Americans either has diabetes or has blood sugar levels high enough to be on the cusp of developing the disease, and one-third of those cases go undiagnosed, new research from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases claims.
According to NBC News, Catherine Cowie of the NIDDK, Andy Menke from the global health research company Social & Scientific Systems, and their colleagues looked at annual nationwide survey data from 5,000 people and found that found that between 12 and 14 percent of adults had been diagnosed with diabetes as of 2012, the most recent data available.
The overwhelming majority of those cases were Type 2 diabetes, which is caused by poor diet, obesity, and lack of exercise, the researchers said. Eleven percent of Caucasians were diabetic, compared to 22 percent of African-Americans, 20 percent of Asian-Americans, and 22.6 percent of Hispanics. As many as half of Asian-Americans and Hispanics were undiagnosed.
“Diabetes prevalence significantly increased over time in every age group, in both sexes, in every racial/ethnic group, by all education levels, and in all poverty income (groups),” between 1988-1994 and 2011-2012, the authors wrote in the latest edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A glimmer of hope
In addition, 38 percent of adults fell into the pre-diabetes category, which is used to measure the number of people who had A1c hemoglobin levels between 5.7 and 6.4 percent, Reuters pointed out. While those people do not have full-blown diabetes, they are considered to be at higher risk of developing the disease.
“We need to better educate people on the risk factors for diabetes – including older age, family history and obesity – and improve screening for those at high risk,” Menke, an epidemiologist at Social & Scientific Systems in Silver Spring, Maryland, told Reuters.
“Although obesity and Type 2 diabetes remain major clinical and public health problems in the United States, the current data provide a glimmer of hope,” William Herman and Amy Rothberg from the University of Michigan wrote in an article that accompanied the paper, according to the Los Angeles Times.
They said the findings indicate that the implementation of new policies governing nutrition and physical activity on the federal, state, and local levels, as well as other anti-obesity initiatives, have started to pay dividends. “Progress has been made, but expanded and sustained efforts will be required” for that success to be sustained, Herman and Rothberg wrote.
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