Forty million Americans have diabetes and a quarter do not know

40.1 million people in the United States have diabetes. **1 in 4 of them
do not know they have it.**

The second number is the one worth sitting with. A quarter of everyone with
the condition is not managing it, not taking anything for it, and not being
monitored — not through any failure of will, but because nobody has told them.

Why not knowing is the problem

People with diabetes are at higher risk of serious health complications. The
damage that diabetes does is slow and, in its early stages, silent: it works
on blood vessels, kidneys, eyes and nerves before it produces a symptom
anybody would take to a doctor.

So the undiagnosed quarter are not a statistical footnote. They are the group
accumulating complications for the longest, with the least to show for it at
the point of diagnosis.

The two things that are true at once

Type 2 diabetes can be prevented. Where it has not yet developed — at the
prediabetes stage — it can be prevented or delayed.

Diabetes can be managed. Where it has developed, the complications are not
inevitable.

Both of those depend on the same precondition, which is knowing. The
prevention message reaches people who have been told they have prediabetes;
the management message reaches people who have been diagnosed. Neither reaches
the 1 in 4.

Which makes the practical action here unusually simple: if you have risk
factors for type 2 diabetes and have never been tested, the test is the whole
of the intervention available to you today.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.