general diabetes facts

Fact Sheets: General Diabetes Facts

What is Diabetes?
Diabetes is a chronic, debilitating disease affecting every organ system. There are two major types of diabetes: type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which a person's pancreas stops producing insulin, a hormone that enables people to get energy from food. Type 1 diabetes usually strikes in childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood, and lasts a lifetime. Just to survive, people with type 1 diabetes must take multiple injections of insulin daily or continually infuse insulin through a pump. Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder in which a person's body still produces insulin but is unable to use it effectively. Type 2 is usually diagnosed in adulthood and does not always require insulin injections. However, increased obesity has led to a recent rise in cases of type 2 diabetes in children and young adults.

Taking insulin does not cure any type of diabetes, nor does it prevent the possibility of the disease's devastating effects: kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, amputation, heart attack, stroke, and pregnancy complications.

The Scope of Diabetes

• Nearly 24 million Americans have diabetes (7.8 percent of the population):

Diagnosed: 17.9 million
Undiagnosed: 5.7 million

• As many as three million Americans may have type 1 diabetes.
• Diabetes currently affects 285 million people worldwide and is expected to affect 435 million by 2030.
• In the U.S., a new case of diabetes is diagnosed every 30 seconds; more than 1.6 million people are diagnosed each year.

The Cost of Diabetes

• Diabetes is one of the costliest chronic diseases.
• In 2007, diabetes accounted for $174 billion in health care costs in the U.S.
• Diabetes accounts for 32 percent of all Medicare expenditures.
• The nation spent $11,744 annually on each person with diabetes in 2007 compared to $2,935 on each person without diabetes.
• Americans with diabetes incur medical expenses that are approximately 2.3 times higher than those incurred by Americans without diabetes.
• U.S. hospital stays related to diabetes totaled $58.3 billion in 2007.
• An estimated 22 percent of hospital inpatient days in the U.S. were incurred by people with diabetes in 2007.

The Harm Caused by Diabetes
Damage to Many Organ Systems: Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure, adult blindness, and non-traumatic amputations. It is also a leading cause of nerve damage.

Increased Heart Disease Risk: People with diabetes are two-to-four times more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than people without the disease.

Shortened Life: Diabetes kills one American every three minutes and is the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. Life expectancy for people with diabetes has historically been shortened by an average of seven to 10 years, and the risk of death for people with diabetes is about double that of people of similar age without diabetes.

Type 1 Diabetes, 2004; KRC Research for JDRF, Jan. 2005

For more information, visit the JDRF web site at http://www.jdrf.org/ or call 800-533-CURE.

JANUARY 2010