CDC: Diabetes Threat to 1 in 3 Children
Source: Lancaster Sunday News (June 15, 2003)
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 o them are likely to develop the disease, said Dr. I.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.