Diabetes and African Americans

How Does Diabetes Affect African-American Young People?

African American children seem to have lower rates of type 1 diabetes than white American children. Researchers tend to agree that genetics probably makes type 1 diabetes less common among children with African ancestry compared with children of European ancestry.

How Does Diabetes Affect African American Women during Pregnancy?

Gestational diabetes, in which blood glucose values are elevated above normal during pregnancy, occurs in about two percent to five percent of all pregnant women. Perinatal problems such as macrosomia (large body size) and neonatal hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) are higher in these pregnancies. The women generally return to normal glucose values after childbirth. However, once a woman has had gestational diabetes, she has an increased risk of developing gestational diabetes in future pregnancies. In addition, experts estimate that about half of women with gestational diabetes develop type 2 diabetes within 20 years of the pregnancy.

Several studies have shown that the occurrence of gestational diabetes in African American women may be 50 percent to 80 percent more frequent than in white women.

How Do Diabetes Complications Affect African Americans?

Compared with white Americans, African Americans experience higher rates of diabetes complications such as eye disease, kidney failure, and amputations. They also experience greater disability from these complications. Some factors that influence the frequency of these complications, such as high blood glucose levels, abnormal blood lipids, high blood pressure, and cigarette smoking, can be influenced by proper diabetes management.

Eye Disease

Diabetic retinopathy is a deterioration of the blood vessels in the eye that is caused by high blood glucose. It can lead to impaired vision and, ultimately, to blindness. The frequency of diabetic retinopathy is 40 percent to 50 percent higher in African Americans than in white Americans, according to NHANES III data. Retinopathy may also occur more frequently in black Americans than in whites because of their higher rate of hypertension. Although blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy is believed to be more frequent in blacks than in whites, there are no valid studies that compare rates of blindness between the two groups.

Kidney Failure

African Americans with diabetes experience kidney failure, also called end-stage renal disease (ESRD), about four times more often than diabetic white Americans. In 1995, there were 27,258 new cases of ESRD attributed to diabetes in black Americans. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure and accounted for 43 percent of the new cases of ESRD among black Americans during 1992-1996. Hypertension, the second leading cause of ESRD, accounted for 42 percent of cases. In spite of their high rates of ESRD, African Americans have better survival rates after they develop kidney failure than white Americans.

Amputations

Based on the U.S. hospital discharge survey, there were about 13,000 amputations among black diabetic individuals in 1994, which involved 155,000 days in the hospital. African Americans with diabetes are much more likely to undergo a lower-extremity amputation than white or Hispanic Americans with diabetes. The hospitalization rate of amputations for blacks was 9.3 per 1,000 patients in 1994, compared with 5.8 per 1,000 white diabetic patients. However, the average length of hospital stay was lower for African Americans (12.1 days) than for white Americans (16.5 days).

Does Diabetes Cause Excess Deaths in African Americans?

Diabetes was an uncommon cause of death among African Americans at the turn of the century. By 1994, however, death certificates listed diabetes as the seventh leading cause of death for African Americans. For those age 45 years or older, it was the fifth leading cause of death.

Death rates (mortality) for people with diabetes are higher for blacks than for whites. Figure 3 shows death rates for whites and blacks with diabetes in a national survey of people first studied in 1971-1975 whose mortality was confirmed through 1992-1993. In every age group and for both men and women, death rates for blacks with diabetes were higher than for whites with diabetes. The overall mortality rate was 20 percent higher for black men and 40 percent higher for black women, compared with their white counterparts.

Points To Remember

Back to Who Gets Diabetes

Reprinted with permission from the National Diabetes Institute Clearinghouse



Page 1 2

Copyright © 2000-2024 savvyHEALTH.com. All rights reserved.




About savvyHEALTH | Privacy | Feedback | Home

http://www.savvyHEALTH.com/

All contents copyright © 1999-2024 savvyHEALTH, Inc. All rights reserved.

This internet site provides information of a general nature and is designed for educational purposes only. If you have any concerns about your own health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Please review the Terms of Use before using this site. Your use of the site indicates your agreement to be bound by the Terms of Use.