NEW YORK (Reuters) –- The percentage of Mexican Americans with type 2 diabetes, the kind closely linked to obesity, has nearly doubled since 1993, new research shows.

But while the rate of diabetes-related complications has declined among people with diabetes in the U.S. overall, it hasn't dropped among Mexican Americans 75 and older, Dr. Holly A. Beard of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and her colleagues found.
“In light of the high prevalence of diabetes in this group, no improvement in diabetes-related complications heightens the urgency for public health interventions,” the researchers wrote in the journal Diabetes Care.
Mexican Americans are known to have a greater risk of diabetes and diabetes complications than non-Hispanic whites, Beard and her team explain, but to date there has been no research looking specifically at trends in diabetes among the oldest Mexican Americans.
To investigate, the researchers looked at data from a community-based study of Mexican Americans aged 75 and older living in the southwestern United States. Their analysis included 1,132 men and women who were surveyed between 1993 and 1994, and another group of 902 men and women surveyed in 2004 and 2005.
While 20 percent of people in the earlier survey were obese, and 37 percent reported having high blood pressure, those percentages jumped to 29 percent and 57 percent, respectively, in the later survey, Beard and her team found. And while 20 percent of people in the first group had diabetes, 37 percent of the second group did. The increase in diabetes was seen for people of every age, in both men and women, and across all demographic categories.
At both time points, the rate of diabetes complications such as kidney disease and vision problems was the same, although people in the second group with diabetes were at greater risk of disability.