One in three American children born in 2000 will develop diabetes in his or her lifetime, according to a new U.S. government report.

K.M. Venkat Narayan, MD, Chief of the Diabetes Epidemiology Section at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, presented the findings here on June 14th at the American Diabetes Association 63rd Annual Scientific Sessions.

Dr. Narayan said he undertook the study because despite the increasing prevalence of diabetes in the United States and other developed nations, no one had performed a study looking at the lifetime risk of developing the disease.

He used data from the annual National Health Interview Surveys of a representative sample of 360,000 Americans from 1983 to 2000 to estimate age-, sex- and ethnicity-specific prevalence and incidence rates for diabetes for the year 2000. Then, data from the U.S. Census Bureau data and from a previous study of death rates among people with diabetes were used to estimate mortality rates for people with and without the disease.

The study showed that 33% of boys and 39% of girls born in 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetime. Hispanic children face the worse odds of developing the disease: 45% of the boys and 53% of the girls will become diabetic, the model predicted. Black boys and girls stand a 40 and 45% risk of developing diabetes in their lifetimes, respectively, while for white boys and girls, the comparable figures are 27% and 31%, Dr. Narayan said.

At a press conference to discuss the findings, Dr. Narayan said that an American man diagnosed with diabetes at age 40 will die 12 years sooner than he would have had he not developed the disease. In contrast, a woman diagnosed at that age will have 14 years shaved off her lifespan.

"We knew that the diabetes rate was increasing, but this finding was dramatic even to us," Dr. Narayan said. The projected lifetime risk is about three times higher than the American Diabetes Association's current estimate, he said.