Subscribe to the RSS feed.Diabetes Cases in U.S. Could Double Within 25 Years
A study published in the December issue of Diabetes Care predicts that the number of Americans with diabetes will double by 2034, posing a “significant strain” to the U.S. health care system.
Researchers from the University of Chicago analyzed data for patients between age 24 and age 85 who participated in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the National Health Interview Survey to project future diabetes rates. According to the data, 44.1 million people will be diabetic over the next 25 years, from 23.7 million in 2009.
Although the study predicts that diabetes prevalence will grow during this time, researchers note that the changes stem from the size of incoming age cohorts, including the “baby boomer” generation, rather than by changes in obesity and overweight rates, which are expected to remain “fairly stable” in the non-diabetes population at roughly 30 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
How serious could this be? In our interview with Mary Lou Hennrich last year, she said “think about all the people who are now getting diabetes when they’re 20 to 25 years old. Twenty years from then, they’re 40 and 45 years old. This is the age of what should be the intellectual and economic engine for society! It’s a time bomb.”
“We need to engage business leaders in this. That’s what I say to my friends who run hospitals and health insurance companies. If we don’t fix this, where are you going to get nurses who can walk up and down a hospital floor, to stand by a bedside? We haven’t seen the final effects of all the amputations that haven’t even happened yet.”
As Dr. Elbert Huang of the University of Chicago, one of the authors of the study, said in a Reuters article, “Diabetes is a major public health problem right now, but it’s important for the country and for policymakers to have an idea of what will happen in the next couple of decades…We already have a financial crisis at hand in healthcare and we need to plan for how we can deal with those costs in the future.”
