Diabetes and pre-diabetes have skyrocketed among the nation's young people, jumping from 9% of the adolescent population in 2000 to 23% in 2008, a study reports today.
The findings, reported in the journal Pediatrics, are "very concerning," says lead author Ashleigh May, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"To get ahead of this problem, we have to be incredibly aggressive and look at children and adolescents and say you have to make time for physical activity," says pediatric endocrinologist Larry Deeb, former president of medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association.
May and colleagues examined data on about 3,400 adolescents ages 12 to 19 from 1999 through 2008. They participated in the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, considered the gold standard for evaluating health in the USA because it includes a detailed physical examination, plus measures of blood pressure, blood sugar levels, height and weight.
May notes that the diabetes findings should be interpreted "with caution" because the fasting blood glucose test was used and there are disadvantages associated with this test. Instead, many physicians use the A1C test, which looks at a person's average blood sugar levels for the past three months.
"I wouldn't be surprised if pre-diabetes and diabetes went up some, but how much it may have gone up is still an open question because of the way they measured it," says Stephen Daniels, chairman of the department of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a spokesman for the American Heart Association.
Still, about one-third of adolescents in the USA are overweight or obese, which increases their risk of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and other problems.
Deeb says other research suggests there will be "a 64% increase in diabetes in the next decade," which is even higher than the predicted increase in obesity, "because stress on the pancreas and insulin resistance catches up with people. We are truly in deep trouble. Diabetes threatens to destroy the health care system."
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