Diabetes epidemic in indigenous populations’ highlights disparity – CBC

‘The alarm was on. People started working on it. But somehow the snooze button got pressed’

Sep 19, 2016

About eight in 10 Indigenous Canadians who are young adults will develop Type 2 diabetes in their lifetimes compared with five in 10 in the general population, a new study suggests.

To make the projection published in Monday’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers in Alberta used data on a population of 2.8 million adults who were free of diabetes in the province and followed their health records for 20 years.

If 20-year-olds are followed for the rest of their lifetimes, the researchers estimated about eight in 10 First Nations people and about five in 10 non-First Nations people will develop diabetes, Dr. Tanvir Chowdhury Turin, of the family medicine department at the University of Calgary, and his co-authors said.

Read More: http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/diabetes-type-2-first-nations-1.3768773?cmp=rss