The weight of obesity: Public health ponders future of children with diabetes

Adult-onset diabetes is striking patients who are barely teenagers, raising questions if severe diabetic complications will develop in patients at younger ages as well. Part 2 of a 3-part series.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Oct. 13, 2003.

The weight of OBESITY A three-part series  Linking large people to care (Oct. 6)  Public health ponders future of children with diabetes (Oct. 13)  Lessons from the fattest state (Oct. 20)

Physicians and public health officials are issuing dire warnings about what could become of the children now developing type 2 diabetes, previously considered a disease of adulthood. As its incidence rate among young people continues to increase, so do troubling forecasts of the likely complications -- the heart attacks, strokes, kidney failures, amputations and blindness -- that would strike these people just as they reach the prime of life.

"Diabetes wears your body out," said Mary Kay Sones, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The longer you have it, the more likely you are to have complications."

About 10 years ago, physicians began noticing an increase in type 2 among adolescents and children. They linked it to the alarming rate of youth overweight and obesity. And, although exact CDC statistics will not be available until next year, early data and anecdotal evidence suggest that the numbers will be high.

"We've been seeing increases for several years," said Larry Fox, MD, medical director of the Northeast Florida Pediatric Diabetes Center in Jacksonville. "There are more now than last year and more last year than the year before."

Addressing the root cause of this phenomenon -- obesity -- is one critical public health dilemma. But a separate pressing question now has to do with preventing the downstream complications in the young people who already have type 2 diabetes. Most type 2 diabetics do not confront these difficulties until at least 15 years after the disease hits. This leads experts to predict a dire future for this new generation of diabetics.