Cases of diabetes in kids are surging throughout the U.S. What about Tarrant County?
The number of young people living with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes has risen steadily over the last 16 years, according to new research, making clear that the chronic disease is no longer a rarity among children and teenagers.
A 16-year-study involving millions of children in six areas of the U.S. found surging increases in the number of kids and teenagers under age 20 diagnosed with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Across the 16-year period, the number of young people living with type 1 diabetes increased by 45%. The number of kids between the ages of 10 and 19 living with type 2 diabetes increased by 95%, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
At Cook Children’s pediatric diabetes and endocrinology clinic, Dr. Don Wilson said he and his colleagues treat more than 2,000 kids with type 1 diabetes, and more than 600 kids with type 2 diabetes.
That number grows weekly, he said.
“We get four or five new cases (of type 1 diabetes) a week,” said Wilson, a pediatric endocrinologist. “It’s frightening.”
The new research is key to understanding the prevalence of diabetes in children because, unlike for diabetes diagnoses in adults, there is no national or state dataset tracking how many people under the age of 20 have been diagnosed with type 1 or 2 diabetes.
In Tarrant County, for example, data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System estimates that about 10.9% of county residents age 20 and older have been diagnosed with diabetes. There is no comparable surveillance study for children.
A decade ago, “type 2 diabetes was still considered relatively rare in pediatrics,” said Dr. Lisa Swartz Topor, an associate professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “Diabetes in youth is not rare... Every school nurse is taking care of a kid with diabetes, if not multiple kids.”
Fort Worth was not included as one of the locations in the study, but Swartz Topor said the number of children and the diversity of locations was big enough to be reflective of most of the country.
The shift is a significant one: Type 2 diabetes used to be known as “adult-onset diabetes,” a name that no longer reflects the growing number of children being diagnosed with the disease.
The observational study found that the rate of type 2 diabetes grew fastest in Black and Hispanic children, and that Black and American Indian children had the highest rate of type 2 diabetes per 1,000 people.
The increases in children of color in particular leaves important questions for the future research. Swartz Topor, who is also the director of pediatric endocrinology at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, outlined some of the most urgent questions: Why is this affecting certain populations more than others? What are the differences in the environmental exposures and in access to health care? And how can communities identify the kids most at risk and support them?
Wilson, the pediatric endocrinologist in Fort Worth, identified similar questions for Tarrant County. He said the answering these questions would allow for the best care for diabetic and at-risk children, but would also be essential for a community’s public health and health care systems overall.
Although both types of diabetes are treatable and manageable disease, they do require regular access to health care to be managed. Once a child is diagnosed with diabetes, they’ll need to see a doctor every three months for the rest of their lives to adequately manage the disease, Swartz Topor said.
For those adults without health insurance, which is almost one out of every five adults under 65 in Tarrant County, such regular access to health care is almost impossible, Wilson said. Left unmanaged, both types of diabetes can lead to serious complications, and often hospitalizations.
Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in Tarrant County, according to a 2016 report from Tarrant County Public Health. Diabetes is the fifth leading cause of death among Black and Hispanic residents of the county.
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
