CDC Diabetes Research: Current Studies on Surveillance, Policy and Prevention

What the research is for

CDC's Division of Diabetes Translation (DDT) conducts and supports studies, often with partners, to build and apply sound science that reduces the burden of diabetes and answers the research needs of its own programs and the diabetes community. The work falls into three areas.

Applied research and surveillance

Applied research looks for risk factors that can be changed, tests how well interventions work — for individuals, health care systems, communities and policy — and ranks the value of successful ones. Surveillance collects and analyzes data to measure the burden of diabetes and related conditions, evaluate prevention programs, guide decisions and set national public health priorities.

• Diabetes in Young Adults (DiYA) Study — counts new cases of type 1 and type 2 diabetes in adults aged 20–45, using Kaiser Permanente data in California. Half of type 1 cases begin in adulthood, yet data on type 1 incidence in U.S. adults are very limited.
• DiCAYA Study (Diabetes by Type in Children, Adolescents and Young Adults) — a multicenter effort using electronic health records to modernize surveillance and track how common diabetes is, and how often it begins, by type.

Health policy and health services

This research examines how health policies and system-wide approaches affect diabetes risk and outcomes for different groups.

• NEXT-D3 (Natural Experiments for Translation in Diabetes 3.0) — a five-year network studying policy and practice changes as they happen: how federal and state laws and health plan innovations affect type 2 diabetes risk, treatment and outcomes; the real-world effects of wider insurance under the Affordable Care Act; and interventions that make medicines easier to get.

Effectiveness research

This research asks whether ways to prevent, diagnose, treat and monitor diabetes actually work, and which work best for particular groups in particular circumstances.

• Look AHEAD Extension (Action for Health in Diabetes) — the long-term effects of an intensive lifestyle intervention on life expectancy, health care costs and healthy aging: less frailty, fewer small-blood-vessel complications, and better quality of life.
• Da Qing Diabetes Prevention Study, 30-year follow-up — the long-term effects of lifestyle change on cardiovascular disease, small-blood-vessel complications such as eye and kidney disease, and life expectancy.

More from CDC: the U.S. Diabetes Surveillance System, the Chronic Kidney Disease Surveillance System, the Vision and Eye Health Surveillance System, the Diabetes State Burden Toolkit and the Diabetes Prevention Impact Toolkit.

Sources

Based on "Current Research Projects," Diabetes, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (updated September 16, 2026); a work of the United States government in the public domain.