Child diabetes rates eclipse US

by Gary Finnegan – World Health Matters (China) –

Child diabetes levels in China are higher than those in the US, according to a startling new study based on official Chinese health data.

The rise in the incidence of diabetes come in tandem with increases in cardiovascular risk, say researchers, and is the result of a Chinese population that is growing increasingly overweight.

The study is a collaboration between the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CCDC) National Institute of Nutrition and Food Safety and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It draws on statistics collected by the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), the longest ongoing study of its kind in China. Between 1989 and 2011, the study followed more than 29,000 people in 300 communities throughout China, with surveys conducted in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009 and 2011.

China has experienced unprecedented economic growth in the past two decades, but the study finds that at the same time, China has seen equally dramatic changes in the weight, diets and physical activity levels of its people. Researchers followed a randomly selected sample representing 56% of the Chinese population in 2009 and found large increases in overweight and cardiometabolic risk factors.

“What is unprecedented is the changes in diet, weight and cardiovascular risk for children age 7 and older. These estimates highlight the huge burden that China’s health care system is expected to face if nothing changes,” the researchers say.

The rate of diabetes was found to be 1.9% while pre-diabetes levels are 14.9 percent in Chinese children age 7-17. Researchers noted that high levels of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) were found in the children’s blood. HbA1c is a measure of the average plasma-glucose concentration over time.

“The findings suggest a very high burden of chronic disease risk starting at a young age, with 1.7 million Chinese children ages 7-18 having diabetes and another 27.7 million considered prediabetic. In addition, more than one-third of children under age 18 had high levels of at least one cardiometabolic risk factor,” the authors said.

Comparing the Chinese data with data from the United States based on National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES) results, the authors found that diabetes and inflammation rates were higher in the Chinese paediatric population than in the US paediatric population or in other Asian countries.

While 1.9% of Chinese children age 12-18 had diabetes, this compares to 0.5% of children in the US. The study also found great disparity with respect to inflammation, a key cardiovascular risk factor; 12.1% of Chinese adolescents showed a high inflammation risk, compared to 8.5% of adolescents in the U.S.

These results reinforce earlier research by the authors that found higher levels of obesity emerging in the past decade among the poor and those living in rural areas of China.