‘The alarm was on. People started working on it. But somehow the snooze button got pressed’
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, Tanvir Chowdhury Turin, of the family medicine department at the University of Calgary, and his co-authors said.
“The numbers we find are staggering and concerning,” Turin said in an interview.