Diabetes prevention

Help seniors avoid chronic illnesses

Right now, 86 million American adults are living with prediabetes, and up to a third of these individuals will develop type 2 diabetes within 5 years if left untreated. Diabetes and its complications place a heavy emotional and financial toll on patients and their families. Type 2 diabetes is also a leading cause of dangerous and costly complications, including blindness, amputation, heart disease and kidney failure.

Some facts to consider:

• 51 percent of all seniors already have prediabetes
• Nearly 90 percent of people with prediabetes don’t know they have it
• Diabetes and prediabetes cost this country $322 billion a year

The good news is that we have a proven, evidence-based lifestyle intervention, known as the National Diabetes Prevention Program (National DPP). The National DPP is a community program that replicates the results of a groundbreaking National Institutes of Health clinical trial. The trial showed a significant reduction in the number of new cases of diabetes in people with prediabetes—a 58 percent reduction overall and a 71 percent reduction in new cases for those over age 60. 

Unfortunately, Medicare does not cover participation in the National DPP. 

Together, the American Medical Association and the American Diabetes Association are calling on Congress to pass, S. 1131/H.R. 2102, the Medicare Diabetes Prevention Act of 2015, which would add the diabetes prevention program as a covered benefit under Medicare and help seniors avoid diabetes and other chronic illnesses.