CDC Issues Diabetes Warning for Children
Posted on Sun, June 15, 2003
By Janet Mcconnaughey
Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS - One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many
more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention warns.
The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to
develop the disease, said Dr. K.M. Venkat Narayan, a diabetes epidemiologist at the CDC.
"I think the fact that the diabetes epidemic has been raging has been well known to us
for several years. But looking at the risk in these terms was very shocking to us,"
Narayan said.
The 33 percent lifetime risk is about triple the American Diabetes Association's current
estimate.
The implications are frightening. Diabetes leads to a host of problems, including
blindness, kidney failure, amputation and heart disease, and diabetics are getting
younger and younger.
Including undiagnosed cases, authorities believe about 17 million Americans, nearly 6
percent of the U.S. population, have diabetes today.
If the CDC predictions are accurate, some 45 million to 50 million U.S. residents could
have diabetes by 2050, said Dr. Kevin McKinney, director of the adult clinical
endocrinological unit at the University of Texas Medical Center in Galveston.
"There is no way that the medical community could keep up with that," he said.
McKinney, who was not part of the study, said Narayan's procedures are valid and the
estimates, being presented Saturday to the American Diabetes Association, are probably
all too likely.
Diabetes, a disease caused largely by obesity and lack of exercise, has been an
increasing worry for decades. From the mid-1960s to the mid-'90s, the number of cases
tripled.
The number of diagnosed cases rose by nearly half in just the past 10 years, hitting 11
million in 2000, and is expected to rise an additional 165 percent by 2050, to 29
million, an earlier CDC study by Narayan and others found.
"These estimates I am giving you now are probably quite conservative," Narayan said in
an interview before the diabetes association's annual scientific meeting here.
Narayan said it would be difficult to say whether undiagnosed cases would rise at the
same rate. If they did, that could push the 2050 figure to 40 million or more.
Doctors had known for some time that Type 2 diabetes - what used to be called
adult-onset diabetes because it typically showed up in middle-aged people - is on the
rise, and that patients are getting younger.
Nobody else had crunched the numbers to look at current odds of getting the disease,
Narayan said.
Overall, he said, 39 percent of the girls who now are healthy 2 1/2- to 3-year-olds and
33 percent of the boys are likely to develop diabetes, he said.
For Hispanic children, the odds are closer to one in two: 53 percent of the girls and 45
percent of the boys. The numbers are about 49 percent and 40 percent for black girls and
boys, and 31 percent and 27 percent for white girls and boys.
To reach his estimates, Narayan used data from the annual National Health Interview
Survey of about 360,000 people from 1984-2000, from the U.S. Census Bureau and from a
previous study of diabetes as a cause of death.
Globally, the World Health Organization has estimated that by 2025, the number of people
with diabetes worldwide will more than double, from 140 million to 300 million.
"They estimated that by 2025, there would be close to 60 million people with diabetes in
India alone. That's about the size of Great Britain or France," Narayan said.
It doesn't have to happen.
Type 2 diabetes can be prevented or delayed by losing weight, exercising and following a
sensible diet.
A study two years ago found that walking 30 minutes a day most days of the week and
losing a little weight helped the people most likely to get it cut their risk 58
percent.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services used that information last fall in its
"Small Steps, Big Rewards" campaign against diabetes.
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