More than half of Asian Americans and almost half of Hispanic Americans with diabetes are undiagnosed, according to federal health researchers.
The findings from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were published in September in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers also found that the overall prevalence of diabetes increased from nearly 10 percent of all American adults to slightly more than 12 percent between 1988 and 2012. Diabetes rose across all ethnic, age, gender, and socioeconomic lines, the researchers reported.
Researchers used data from the 2011-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to break down diabetes prevalence. For the first time, they were able to quantify diabetes prevalence among Asian Americans at 21 percent, who have the highest percentage of undiagnosed diabetes cases at 51 percent.
Researchers believe diagnosis rates among Asian Americans may be low because Asian Americans tend to develop Type 2 diabetes at a lower body mass index than other groups. Type 2 diabetes is most commonly related to being overweight and/or obese, but other factors play a role in its development.
Hispanic Americans have the highest diabetes incidence of any ethnic group at nearly 23 percent. Researchers found that 49 percent of Hispanic Americans with diabetes don’t know they have it.
“The large proportion of people with undiagnosed diabetes points to both a greater need to test for Type 2 diabetes and a need for more education on when to test for Type 2 diabetes, especially since populations such as Asian Americans may develop type 2 at a lower body mass than other groups,” said the study’s senior author, Catherine Cowie, Ph.D., director of diabetes epidemiology programs at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).
Study authors said diabetes in the Asian subgroup is not well-studied. However, many ethnicities are included in the Asian American subgroup, and the data doesn’t look at differences in diabetes incidence and risk factors, such as weight and diet, between those ethnicities.
About 1 in 5 non-Hispanic black adults had diabetes, higher than the overall population. However, they had a lower proportion of diabetes that was undiagnosed than the Asian or Hispanic subgroups, with about 37 percent being undiagnosed. Non-Hispanic whites had the lowest prevalence of diabetes at 11 percent, and they had the lowest proportion of undiagnosed, at just over 32 percent.
By learning more about who has diabetes, public health officials can target prevention efforts more accurately, researchers said.
A diabetes diagnosis can only come from a physician. The St. Elizabeth Physicians Regional Diabetes Center is the only one of its kind in the Greater Cincinnati region.
