Excerpt from The New York Times: (click for entire article)
The number of Americans with diabetes will nearly double over the next 25 years, while the cost of care will almost triple, as patients live longer and develop more of the disease’s long-term complications, a new analysis said.
The projections estimate that the population will rise to 44.1 million in 2034, from 23.7 million now, with medical spending increasing to $336 billion from $113 billion. The calculations were published in the December issue of the journal Diabetes Care.
The projections differ from earlier calculations by other researchers because they take the natural history of diabetes into account, as well as the fact that Americans are being told that they have the condition at younger ages. As affected people live longer, they will have more opportunities to develop complications, including end-stage kidney disease, amputations and blindness, the paper’s authors said.
“In 25 years, there’s going to be this convergence of the population getting older but also many people having had diabetes for a long period of time, and that will lead to higher costs,” said Dr. Elbert S. Huang, the lead author of the paper, who is part of a University of Chicago diabetes research team. “Duration of diabetes is as important a predictor of complications as glucose.”
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