For years doctors have warned of a rising epidemic of diabetes among children. Yet there has been surprisingly little firm data on the extent of this disease among younger Americans.
Now a nationally representative study has confirmed that from 2001 to 2009 the incidence of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes drastically increased among children and adolescents across racial groups.
The prevalence of Type 1 diabetes increased 21 percent among children up to age 19, the study found. The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes among those ages 10 to 19 rose 30 percent during the period.
Those are “big numbers,” said Dr. Robin S. Goland, a co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who has been in practice for about 25 years. “In my career, Type 1 diabetes was a rare disease in children, and Type 2 disease didn’t exist. And I’m not that old.”
The analysis, published on Saturday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, includes data from more than three million children younger than 20 in five states — California, Colorado, Ohio, South Carolina and Washington — as well as from selected American Indian reservations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/us/study-reveals-sizable-increase-in-diabetes-among-children.html
Full article in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Prevalence of Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Among Children and Adolescents From 2001 to 2009
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