Diabetes Health Is Improving In The US

1

In 2009, the 10 leading causes of death in the US were, in rank
order:

Heart disease: 599,413
Cancer: 567,628
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
Alzheimer's disease: 79,003
Diabetes: 68,705
Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
Intentional self-harm (suicide):
So Diabetes ranked number 7 that year.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm

I recently saw an old article online that said diabetes was the third leading cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer. I don't know what year that was, but since it is the seventh leading cause now, we have certainly come a long way.

The link below says that the life expectancy of type 1 diabetics is almost as good as that of non diabetics:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/medical/health/medical/diabetes/story/2011/06/Life-expectancy-improves-for-type-1-diabetics/48851072/1

2

I dunno if diabetes is accurately reported as a "cause of death" though? I suspect that in a lot of cases, if PWD has a heart attack, it's put on the board as a "heart attack" with little investigation of whether or not diabetes "fed" the CVD that led to the heart attack? I also suspect that a lot of cases might be 50/50 or whatever but I'm always leery of those sort of statistics.

3

I agree with you. That may happen a lot.