THURSDAY, Sept. 4, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- One in seven American adults, or 29 million people, have diabetes or are well on their way toward the blood sugar disease, a new survey has found.
The 1999-2000 survey, from government and private researchers, found that about 11.8 million adults have been diagnosed with diabetes, while almost five million more have the condition but haven't yet been diagnosed.
Another 12.3 million adults have mild difficulty processing blood sugar, a situation called "pre-diabetes." People with pre-diabetes are at significantly increased risk of developing full-blown diabetes.
Experts believe roughly half of people with pre-diabetes will progress to true diabetes over a 10-year period, says Matt Petersen, director of scientific and medical information for the American Diabetes Association, in Alexandria, Va.
Diabetes involves problems with insulin, a hormone that helps cells convert blood sugar, or glucose, into energy. There are two forms of diabetes, type 1, or juvenile, and type 2, or adult-onset. In type 1 diabetes, which typically occurs early in life, insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas die off, starving the body of the hormone. In the second form of the condition, cells gradually become resistant to insulin.
Both forms, if untreated, can lead to serious complications, from nerve damage and blindness to heart attacks and strokes.
Type 2 diabetes is 10 times more common than juvenile diabetes, partly because of its link with obesity. Public health officials worldwide have sounded alarms about the surge in overweight and obesity in industrialized countries that has led to a global epidemic of diabetes.
Even if Americans were to reverse course and start losing weight and exercising more, Petersen says, the effects on the nation's diabetes rates probably wouldn't appear for a decade or so.
The latest figures come from a 1999-2000 survey of health and nutrition habits, and included almost 4,900 people age 20 and older. Researchers performed blood sugar tests on 1,996 of those who had not been diagnosed with diabetes to determine how many had undetected diabetes.
Diabetes was more common among blacks and Hispanics than whites, and occurred more in older people than in the young, the researchers found. Still, previous reports have shown obesity-related diabetes is becoming a significant concern among teens and even younger children in this country.
The percentage of people with confirmed diabetes appears to have jumped somewhat since the mid-1990s. But Catherine Cowie, director of diabetes epidemiology at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, says the survey was too small to provide concrete conclusions about such trends.
However, Cowie, who led the study, adds, it's pretty clear that the prevalence of the condition isn't falling.
"I don't think we've seen a plateau because obesity levels are increasing," Cowie says. Her group is now working to refine their results.
The findings appear in Friday's issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
More information
Visit the American Diabetes Association or the National Diabetes Information Clearing House.
