Diabetes affects 25.8 million people in the United States which is 8.3% of the US population, according to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet 2011.  Among US residents aged 65 years and older, 26.9% had diabetes in 2010. and about 1.9 millions people aged 20 years or older were newly diagnosed with diabetes in 2010.  Those are startling figures.  What does that mean for South Dakotans?  In 2010, 41,821 or 6.9% of South Dakotans over the age of 17 had been told they have Type1 or Type 2 diabetes.  It is estimated that 25% of people with diabetes do not knoe they have it, therefore an additional 13,940 South Dakota adults have undiagnosed diabetes.  

Another startling fact is that 35% of US adults aged 20years or older had prediabetes which would include 79 million Americans.  Applying this analysis to South Dakota, more than 200,000 South Dakotans have prediabetes.  Before people develop Type 2 diabetes, they almost always have prediabetes which means their blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes.  Recent research has shown that some long-term damage to the body, especially the heart and circulatory system, may already be occurring during prediabetes. 

The following pages includes more inforamtion on Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes as well as prediabetes.