Dive Brief:
- New cases of diabetes in the U.S. declined in 2014, confirming a statistically significant downward trend over the past five years. The new data were released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday.
- Between 2009 and 2014, the number of new cases decreased from 1.7 million to 1.4 million, a decline of nearly a fifth.
- This trend reverses roughly two decades of steady increases in the number of adults diagnosed with diabetes each year.
Dive Insight:
Over the last 30 years, the number of Americans with diagnosed diabetes shot up fourfold to 22 million people. However, the CDC estimates one in four people are unaware they have diabetes, leading the agency to believe more than 29 million Americans are affected in total.
The new data show an encouraging decline in the annual number of new cases, suggesting growing health awareness and improved diets among Americans may be halting the epidemic's spread. While data had previously shown yearly declines in the first few years of the new decade, the drop had not previously been statistically significant.
However, nearly 10% of Americans still have diabetes, and the disease's incidence rates among minorities remain persistently higher than in the white population. There is also a significant divergence in incidence of diabetes by level of education. For adults with less than a high school education, the CDC measured 11.1 cases of diabetes per 1,000 in 2014, compare with 5.3 cases per 1,000 among those with higher than a high school education.
The CDC only released data, leaving the causes of this drop undetermined. But evidence has suggested Americans' health may be slowly improving as awareness of the detrimental impact of inactivity and high-calorie diets grows.
