Incidence of Diabetes in Children and Youth—Tracking a Moving Target
- Rebecca B. Lipton, PhD, MPH, BSN
- Author Affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.
- Corresponding Author: Rebecca B. Lipton, PhD, MPH, BSN, Department of Pediatrics, University of Chicago, University of Chicago Hospitals C576, MC 5053, Chicago, IL 60637 (lipton{at}uchicago.edu).
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
- KEYWORDS:
- ADOLESCENT
- CHILD
- DIABETES MELLITUS, TYPE 1
- DIABETES MELLITUS, TYPE 2
- INCIDENCE
- PUBLIC HEALTH
Diabetes mellitus takes a huge toll on individual patients in terms of health care complications, such as blindness, kidney failure, cardiovascular disease, and amputations, and also exacts a huge burden on society, in terms of consumption of health care resources. Diabetes occurring early in life has even more devastating effects on the ability of young patients to live full lives and results in substantially increased health care costs related to treating a lifelong, complex disease. Diabetes is the most prevalent chronic disease of childhood after asthma1; therefore, monitoring trends in childhood diabetes is a public health imperative.
The need for standardized data on diabetes began to be addressed in the 1980s, with the establishment of the World Health Organization–sponsored Diabetes Mondiale (DiaMond) study, a consortium of approximately 150 population-based registries that used the same methods for case definition, ascertainment, and validation.2-3 This study initially included …
