CDC : 40 percent of Americans Will Develop Diabetes

Approximately two out of every five Americans will develop type 2 diabetes at some point during their adult lives, according to new U.S. government estimates.

The ongoing diabetes and obesity epidemics have combined with ever-increasing human lifespans to raise lifetime risk of type 2 diabetes to about 40 percent for both men and women, said lead study author Edward Gregg, chief of the epidemiology and statistics branch in the division of diabetes translation at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The researchers found worse odds for black women and Hispanic men and women at 50 percent.

Researchers evaluated medical information and death certificates from some 600,000 adults between 1985 and 2011, to estimate trends in lifetime risk of diabetes as well as years of life lost to diabetes.

Lifetime risk of type 2 diabetes increased for the average 20-year-old American man, from 21 percent in the late 1980s to over 40 percent in 2011. The average 20-year-old woman’s risk increased from 27 percent in the 1980s to nearly 40 percent, the report claims.

“The ‘diabesity’ epidemic is the main driver of these increased risks,” an endocrinologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City Dr. Minisha Sood said as quoted by the HealthDay.

Type 2 diabetes is a condition when the body fails to produce enough insulin and/or is resistant to the effects of insulin, a hormone required by the body to use sugars collected from foods to fuel the cells in the body and brain.

Agencies/Canadajournal