In the United States, nearly 13% of adults age 20 and older have diabetes, but 40% of them have not been diagnosed, according to epidemiologists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose study includes newly available data from an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT).
Diabetes is especially common in the elderly: Nearly one-third of those age 65 and older have the disease. An additional 30% of adults have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar that is not yet in the diabetic range. The researchers report these findings in the February 2009 issue of Diabetes Care, which posted a pre-print version of the article online at http://diabetes.org/diabetescare.
