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Just the Facts

One in a Series of Information Sheets from FDA

New Products to Treat Diabetes

FDA Helps Counter a Major Public Health Threat

Diabetes mellitus is one of the most prevalent and serious diseases in the United States. A chronic ailment that impairs the production of or response to insulin, a hormone that helps convert food into energy, diabetes is diagnosed each year in 800,000 Americans and affects 16 million of them. Type 1 diabetes is diagnosed mostly in children and teenagers; type 2, which accounts for over 90 percent of the cases, is usually found in older and overweight adults. Together they contribute to about 200,000 deaths a year. Diabetes is also the leading cause of end-stage renal disease, blindness in adults, and lower-limb amputations.

To combat this public health hazard, the Food and Drug Administration helps the industry develop, evaluate and make available a variety of products that improve the diagnosis of diabetes and help achieve tighter control of blood glucose levels. Recent advances toward this goal, which reduces the diabetes-associated risk of eye, nerve and kidney diseases, include the following:

For more information, visit the FDA's Web site at www.fda.gov/diabetes.

A Disease on the Rise

Type 2 diabetes is becoming more common in children and teenagers, but it primarily affects non-white Americans who are older and overweight. Hispanics, blacks and American Indians are almost twice as likely to have diabetes as non-Hispanic whites of the same age. Because these and other diabetes-prone minorities are among the fastest growing segments of the United States population, and because Americans are increasingly overweight and sedentary, the incidence of diabetes in the United States is expected to rise to nearly 9 percent of the population by 2025.

Publication No. FS 02-9
February 2002

PDF Version

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