An Epidemiologic Profile of Children With Diabetes in the U.S.

The incidence of both type 1 and type2 diabetes in children appears to beincreasing in the U.S. (1–4), likely attributable, at least for type 2 diabetes, to the emerging epidemic of childhood obe-sity. Unfortunately, national prevalence estimates of children with diabetes, and nationally representative data about the demographic characteristics of children with diabetes, are limited. One study, based on just 13 cases, reported the prev-alence of diabetes among adolescents aged 12–19 years to be 4.1 per 1,000 (5). We used recently released data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) to determine the prevalence of diabetes in U.S. children based on paren-tal report and to examine the association between the presence of obesity and diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS — The NSCH was a pop-ulation-based cross-sectional household telephone survey sponsored by the Mater-nal and Child Health Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Cen-ters for Disease Control and Prevention (6). The NSCH used random-digit dialing to recruit and survey households with children 18 years of age. One child in each household was randomly selected to be the subject of the survey, and the re-spondent for the interview was the parent or guardian who was most familiar with the child’s health and health care. Esti-mates reported here are based on parental interviews regarding 102,353 children, which were completed from January 2003 through July 2004. The prevalence of diabetes was calcu-lated based on the parent’s or guardian’s affirmative response to the question: “Has a doctor or health professional ever told you that your child has diabetes? ” The type of diabetes (type 1 or type 2) was not specified. There were 352 individuals who responded affirmatively, and this number is the basis for calculating the prevalence within the study population. Poverty status was defined as house-hold income 200 % of the poverty level based on the federal poverty guidelines (7), and variables for geographic regions of the U.S. (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West) were defined by census guide-lines (8). BMI was calculated based on the child’s parent-reported weight and height. Using the 2000 Centers for Dis