7-year-olds diagnosed with T2 diabetes Christine Coltrell, a diabetes nurse specialist from Warwick, said: "We are even getting children as young as seven with Type 2 diabetes, and that can have devastating long term health consequences. These children end up having heart attacks, or losing a limb, or their sight, in their 30s and 40s. All these children were seriously obese, she said, but the lifestyle problem which caused them were endemic. "When we look at the way we are living our lives now, there's lots of fast and processed foods on offer," she said. People don't walk their children to school any longer, they drive them. Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care at Leicester University and a GP, said a study of secondary school children in the city showed 40 per cent were spending four hours or more every evening, sitting down. At the moment the number of under 16s diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in Britain is low: only about 300 a year. But he warned: "Unless we do something about it, it's going to get worse. In the US, something like 40 per cent of referrals to paediatric clinics are for Type 2 diabetes. The disease is principally brought on by years of over-eating and not enough exercise, although there is a genetic element too. People of South Asian, Chinese and Afro-Carribean descent are more susceptible to it. Today, up to three million people are diagnosed diabetics, while another 850,000 are thought to have it without knowing. An estimated 10 to 12 million are at high risk of developing it. The numbers are rising rapidly as the nation's waistlines expand. Prof Khunti said: "We used to talk about diabetes being an epidemic; now we are talking about it being a tsunami." He continued: The problem is, people don't regard Type 2 diabetes as a serious condition. "They say, "I've got a touch of diabetes," or "mild diabetes." Unfortunately there's no such thing. The Nice guidance aims to get doctors, nurses and others to encourage people to be screened for it. Type 2 accounts for about 90 per cent of all diabetes cases in Britain. Type 1 diabetes, where the body produces no insulin, is a different condition. usually developing very early in life, it is an auto-immune disease.