
Diabetes Incidence and Historical Trends
Type 1 Diabetes Incidence
There are approximately 500,000 children aged under 15 with type 1 diabetes in the world (Patterson et al. 2014); in 2013 alone, 79,000 more children developed type 1 (IDF Diabetes Atlas 2013). Worldwide, the incidence of type 1 diabetes increased, on average, 3% per year between 1960 to 1996 in children under age 15 (Onkamo et al. 1999). Between 1990 and 1999, incidence increased in most continents, with a rise of 5.3% in North America, 4% in Asia, and 3.2% in Europe. This trend is especially troubling in the youngest children; for every hundred thousand children under age 5, 4% more were diagnosed every year, on average, worldwide (Diamond Project Group 2006).
In the U.S., the latest data show that the prevalence of type 1 diabetes increased by 21% in children between 2001 and 2009 (Dabelea et al. 2014), and the incidence of type 1 diabetes in non-Hispanic whites increased by 2.7% per year between 2002 and 2009 (Lawrence et al. 2014). More recent numbers show that overall, type 1 diabetes incidence in children increased by 1.8% per year between 2002 and 2012 (Mayer-Davis et al. 2017). Those numbers are from the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth study, which has study centers in 5 U.S. states. The CDC collects nation-wide data on diabetes, but does not differentiate between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
A study of a large population of U.S. patients with commercial health insurance found that type 1 (and type 2) prevalence increased between 2002-2013 in children (Li et al. 2015). Another study of U.S. patients-- both children and adults-- with commercial
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