Diabetes Epidemiology: Guiding Clinical and Public Health Practice The Kelly West Award Lecture, 2006

Epidemiology provides a scientific ba-sis for clinical and public healthpractice. Indeed, epidemiology can be used to guide howwe define, diagnose, and screen for diabetes, to describe the present and future burden of diabetes, and to highlight opportunities for inter-vention. What is diabetes? Diabetes is a group of disorders character-ized by high glucose levels that cause unique eye, kidney, and nerve complica-tions and an increased risk for cardiovas-cular disease. A number of approaches have been used to diagnose diabetes. Some have been based on statistical ap-proaches to defining abnormal or hig