'Only Gotten Worse Over Time': CDC Report on Diabetes and Obesity in the US

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released their most recent data on the rates of diabetes and obesity in the United States which they do every 2 years. These are the rates between 2017 and 2019. Not surprisingly, the data have only shown that we get worse over time.

Some 37.3 million people in the United States now have diabetes, which accounts for 11.3% of the US population. About a quarter of the people with diabetes in the US are undiagnosed. Prediabetes accounts for 38% of the entire US population, and interestingly to me, almost half of the people who are 65 years or older have prediabetes.

As a clinician, I'm not quite sure what to do with that because I certainly have seniors who have slight elevations in their fasting glucose values or A1cs where I don't really have to do much clinically. What I think that means is that I need to watch those people for the development of overt diabetes and modify their risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Not all of those people are going to go on to have diabetes.

There are 283,000 children and adolescents younger than the age of 20 years who have diabetes.