New diabetes cases among Americans drop for first time in decades: CDC

According to a latest CDC report, new diabetic cases have greatly declined in the United States of America for the very first time in decades. There were 1.4 million new cases of diabetes in 2014, a drop from 1.7 million in 2008.

This is the very first time in almost a century that there has been a significant decline, the CDC reported. Over that period, the number of adults between 18 and 79 with newly diagnosed diabetes cases more than tripled — jumping from 493,000 to more than 1.4 million new cases a year. About 21.9 million Americans now live with the disease.

Figures from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show the number of new diabetes cases fell by 20 percent from 2008 to 2014, with the total number coming to 1.4 million. There are 22 million people with diabetes in the U.S.

As reported by the New York Times, this is the “first sustained decline since the disease started to explode in this country about 25 years ago.” Edward Gregg, a diabetes expert at the CDC, says the results are “surprising after so many years of seeing increases.”

This notably sharp decrease in new diabetic cases is even more unexpected given rising rates of obesity. The number of obese Americans has risen to its highest point in a decade despite a wave of public health campaigns to get people to change the way they eat and drink.

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Relatively fewer cases of diabetes are being diagnosed in U.S. adults, according to unexpected and latest federal statistics released on Tuesday. Diabetes had been rising to a great extent for decades, driven by surging obesity rates. In 2009, the number of new cases reached 1.7 million. By last year, it had dropped to 1.4 million.

“After so many years of seeing increases, it is surprising,” said Gregg, who has been tracking the numbers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over the past few years, the rate of new cases seemed to be leveling off or even going down, but researchers wanted to see a few more years of data before declaring an improvement, he said.

“This is a little bit of a dip and that’s encouraging,” said Dr. Robert Gabbay, the chief medical officer at Boston’s Joslin Diabetes Center. “But we probably don’t want to say we’ve won the battle and everyone go home.” There are still 1.4 million new adult cases of diabetes each year, he noted. Overall, there are about 22 million Americans with diabetes.

“This is what’s supposed to happen when you put a lot of effort into prevention over the years,” stated Gregg, who is presenting the new data at a diabetes conference in Vancouver on Wednesday.

Experts, however, feel that it remains to be seen and is unclear whether efforts to prevent diabetes have finally started to work, or if the disease has simply peaked in the population. But they claim that the transformation and shift in numbers tracks the nascent progress that has been reported recently in the health of Americans.

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