Kidsweighin.org, Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health

Diabetes: Excerpts from the CDC SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Fact Sheet

Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases among children in the United States. About 150,000 young people under 18 years or about one in every 400 to 500 have diabetes.
People with diabetes are at great risk of developing serious health complications over time, such as heart disease, kidney disease, blindness, and stroke.
Type 1 diabetes normally strikes children and young adults. People with type 1 diabetes must have daily insulin injections to survive.
Each year, more than 13,000 young people are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Health care providers are finding more and more children with type 2 diabetes, a disease usually diagnosed in adults aged 40 years or older.
Children who develop type 2 diabetes are typically overweight or obese and have a family history of the disease. Most are American Indian, African American, Asian, or Hispanic/Latino.
No data currently exist to determine the extent to which type 2 diabetes has emerged among U.S. children and adolescents, but researchers at the CDC estimate that among new cases of childhood diabetes, the proportion of those with type 2 diabetes ranges between 8 percent and 43 percent.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Fact Sheet, 2002.