Diabetes rate in the U.S. has dropped but the battle against the disease continues: CDC

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The health officials were clear about the continuous battle of the nation against diabetes. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC, there has been a considerable decline in the cases of people diagnosed with diabetes in recent years.

According to the data released by the CDC, about 1.4 million Americans were diagnosed with diabetes in 2014 and, although, the number is still big, which makes the disease persisting wide-scale problem in the U.S., it was down by as many as 300,000 new cases as compared to that of in 2009, which is approximately 1.7 million cases.

The decline in the new cases of diabetes has been consistent for the past five years. From 1980 to 2014, the number of adults in the United States aged 18-79 with newly diagnosed diabetes more than tripled from 493,000 in 1980 to more than 1.4 million in 2014.

And between the period of 1991 to 2009, there has been a significant spike in the number of new cases of diabetes from 573,000 to more than 1.7 million. But, in 2009 to 2014, the number of new cases was reduced to 1.4 million.

"It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop," said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC's top diabetes researchers. "Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked."

According to a NY Times report, the decline in the numbers of diabetes cases among Americans only shows that people these days have become more conscious of what they eat. For instance, the amount of soda Americans drink were reduced by 25 percent since the late 1990s, while the average number of daily calories children and adults take have also gone down.

It also helps that most Americans, nowadays, were also ditching their sedentary lifestyle and engaging more and more into fitness activities. Obesity, which is one of the major drivers of type 2 diabetes, has also dwindled in the number of cases.

While these were all welcome developments, Ann Albright, director of the CDC's Division of Diabetes Translation, also said that Americans still have a long, long way to go in their battle with diabetes, wrote NPR.org.

Dr. David Nathan, a diabetes researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, seconded Albright's statement. "It's not like we've beaten the epidemic, but it's the first good news we've had in several decades," he said.