Dramatic Rise in U.S. Kids Hospitalized for Type 2 Diabetes

Mar. 23 -- SATURDAY, May 5 (HealthDay News) -- In another sign of the alarming childhood obesity epidemic in the United States, researchers report a 200 percent increase in the number of children hospitalized for type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes, which used to be called adult onset diabetes because it was rarely seen in children, is typically diagnosed in patients who are overweight. Left untreated, it can lead to such complications as heart disease, blindness, nerve damage and kidney damage.

The dramatic increase in pediatric type 2 diabetes occurred nationwide between 1997 and 2003, according to the study by researchers at New York University School of Medicine.

"The rapid rise in childhood obesity is now common knowledge," said Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center, who was not involved in the study. "Increasingly, so is the concurrent rise in type 2 diabetes in children -- a generation ago, this condition did not exist. What is now called type 2 diabetes was called adult onset diabetes until quite recently."

"Epidemic childhood obesity has transformed a chronic disease of mid-life into a pediatric scourge," Katz added.

For the study, Dr. Rhonda Graves, a pediatrician, and her colleagues used data from nationwide hospital discharge records from 1997, 2000 and 2003. They compared the trends in hospitalization rates, length of stay and costs for children with type 2 diabetes and type 1 diabetes.

They found that rates of hospitalization for type 1 diabetes increased 15 percent between 1997 and 2003, while rates of hospitalizations for type 2 diabetes increased 200 percent.

"These findings, based on hospital records of a nationally representative sample of hospitals in the U.S.A., indicate that type 2 diabetes is increasingly becoming a pediatric illness that results in hospitalizations. It is associated with a very serious number of co-morbidities and complications which may have profound health implications both in childhood and in adulthood," Graves said in a prepared statement.