CDC Releases 2014 National Diabetes Statistics Report with New Outlook

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has released its new data on the state of diabetes in the United States, providing an update on its 2011 National Diabetes Fact Sheet. Using data from 2012, this new report finds that 29.1 million people, or 9.3% of the entire American population, have diabetes, of which roughly 8 million of those cases are currently undiagnosed. There was a slight decline in the number of newly diagnosed cases per year from 1.9 million to 1.7 million people, but this small decrease likely shouldn’t be taken as much of a cause for optimism, particularly when the number of people with prediabetes increased from 79 million in the 2011 Fact Sheet to 86 million in this latest report.

The CDC’s reports aren’t just useful for their raw numbers; they can also be crucial indicators of how people think about disease. In particular, this report places a much greater emphasis on the risks of hypoglycemia than its 2011 counterpart, which remarkably didn’t even mention hypoglycemia in its larger discussion of diabetes. The report also combined the old sections “Treating Diabetes” and “Preventing Complications” into a single section, “Managing Diabetes,” which indicates that public officials are now much more aware of the complex, interconnected nature of this disease; the very acts of monitoring and managing glucose levels are the cornerstones of preventing complications (see learning curve in diaTribe 40 for more). Perhaps most impressively, the CDC highlights the need for individualized care and patient-specific glucose targets. Even as the data in the CDC’s report suggest we still have a long way to go in dealing with the diabetes epidemic, the ideas in the report suggest that public health officials are listening to the ideas and concerns of both experts and patients, and that can only be a good thing moving forward. –ARW