How Do Diabetes Complications
Affect African Americans?
Compared with white Americans, African Americans
experience higher rates of diabetes complications such as eye disease,
kidney failure, and amputations. They also experience greater disability
from these complications. Some factors that influence the frequency of
these complications, such as high blood glucose levels, abnormal blood
lipids, high blood pressure, and cigarette smoking, can be influenced by
proper diabetes management.
Eye Disease
Diabetic retinopathy is a deterioration of the blood
vessels in the eye that is caused by high blood glucose. It can lead to
impaired vision and, ultimately, to blindness. The frequency of diabetic
retinopathy is 40 percent to 50 percent higher in African Americans than
in white Americans, according to NHANES III data. Retinopathy may
also occur more frequently in African Americans than in whites because of
their higher rate of hypertension. Although blindness caused by diabetic
retinopathy is believed to be more frequent in African Americans than in
whites, there are no valid studies that compare rates of blindness between
the two groups.
Kidney Failure
African Americans with diabetes experience kidney
failure, also called end-stage renal disease (ESRD), about four times more
often than diabetic white Americans. In
1995, there were 27,258 new cases of ESRD attributed to diabetes in
African Americans. Diabetes is the leading
cause of kidney failure and accounted for 43 percent of the new cases of
ESRD among African Americans during 1992-1996. Hypertension, the second
leading cause of ESRD, accounted for 42 percent of cases. In spite of
their high rates of ESRD, African Americans have better survival rates
after they develop kidney failure than white Americans.
Amputations
Based on the U.S. hospital discharge survey, there were
about 13,000 amputations among African American diabetic individuals in
1994, which involved 155,000 days in the hospital.
African Americans with diabetes are much more likely to undergo a
lower-extremity amputation than white or Hispanic Americans with diabetes.
The hospitalization rate of amputations for African Americans was 9.3 per
1,000 patients in 1994, compared with 5.8 per 1,000 white diabetic
patients. However, the average length of hospital stay was lower for
African Americans (12.1 days) than for white Americans (16.5 days).
More on this story..
NIDDK, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney
Diseases (NIDDK) Web site, provides accurate, up-to-date information on
many types of diabetes, information on clinical trials, resources for
people dealing with diabetes, and information for researchers and health
professionals.
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