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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> And, according to a report released last year, the number of new cases of type 2 diabetes among middle-aged Americans has doubled over the past three decades, fueled largely by increasing rates of obesity. An estimated two-thirds of adult Americans are now overweight or obese.
For the new study, published in the March 3 issue of The Lancet, researchers used population-based data from Ontario to determine prevalence and mortality of diabetes from 1995 to 2005, and incidence from 1997 to 2003 in adults aged 20 and older.
There was a 69 percent increase -- from 5.2 percent to 8.8 percent -- in diabetes prevalence from 1995 to 2005, exceeding the WHO's estimate of a 60 percent global increase between 1995 and 2030 and a 39 percent increase between 2000 and 2030. In Canada, diabetes prevalence was supposed to grow 65 percent between 1995 and 2030.
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In Ontario, a 27 percent increase took place over just five years. If this continues, more than 10 percent of the adult population of the province will be diagnosed with diabetes before 2010, the researchers said.
"The WHO predicted that, in the developed world, 8.4 percent of the population would have diabetes by 2030, but we saw in Ontario that 8.8 percent of the population already has the disease," said Lipscombe, who's also an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.
The WHO predictions were based on the assumption that obesity rates would remain constant, which hasn't happened, Lipscombe added. Obesity may be one factor driving the explosion of diabetes.
Another factor may be an influx of immigrants to Ontario from regions of the world whose populations are at high risk for the disease once they are introduced to a western diet and lifestyle, she said.
"Our database doesn't allow us to look at ethnicity, but we know that Ontario has seen a 50 percent increase in immigration from certain more at-risk nations like South Asian nations," Lipscombe said. "We also know from previous work that the distribution of diabetes cases across Ontario is not uniform and that there are higher rates in areas that have more at-risk immigrant populations, so it's possible that this is contributing."
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