THURSDAY, June 13, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- People with type 1 diabetes are 25% less likely to die early now than they were in 1990, a new global tally finds, and the number of people who've lived into their senior years with the autoimmune illness keeps rising. The new findings suggest that type 1 diabetes "is no longer a contributory factor in decreased life expectancy owing to improvements in medical care over the three decades," said a team led by Yongze Li , of the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang. Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas.
People with type 1 disease must take insulin each day to remain healthy. About 5% of all diabetes cases are type 1. If poorly controlled, the disease can take a toll on health, and in decades past, people with type 1 diabetes tended to live shorter lives.
The Chinese team looked at data from the Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors Study 2019, to see if things had gotten better for patients. They have: In 1990, the number of people who'd lived to age 65 or older worldwide with type 1 diabetes was estimated to be 1.3 million, but by 2019 it had risen to more than 3.
7 million. At the same time, death rates fell by 25%, from 4.7 per 100,000 population in 1990 to 3.
5 in 2019. These statistics occurred even as type 1 diabetes became more prevalent, according to the study published June 12 in the BMJ . "Globally, the preval.
