New diabetes cases are down in the U.S. for the first time in decades, according to a new CDC report. 
 
 There were 1.4 million new cases of diabetes in 2014, a drop from 1.7 million in 2008. 
 
 It's the first time in a quarter century there's been a significant decline, the CDC reported. Over that period, the number of adults between 18 and 79 with newly diagnosed diabetes cases more than tripled -- jumping from 493,000 to more than 1.4 million new cases a year. About 21.9 million Americans now live with the disease. 
 
 A study last year estimated that nearly 10 percent of U.S. adults have type 2 diabetes, and other research finds more than a third of adults have prediabetes, a high blood sugar condition that may lead to diabetes. 
 
 But this latest CDC data shows a small but promising reversal. 
 
 "This is the first time I think we can really comfortably say we've seen a decrease in incidence in the rate of new cases. For a while we were calling it a plateau," Edward Gregg, chief of epidemiology and statistics in the division of diabetes translation at the CDC, told CBS News. 
 
 Whether prevention efforts are finally bearing fruit, or if the disease has peaked, is unclear. 
 
 "When you see changes like this in a major public health problem it's always difficult to dissect what caused it. We think it's the gradual diffusion of science and education that's occurred over this last decade," Gregg said. 
 
 Health officials have been trying for years to encourage exercise and better dietary habits to help reduce the risk of diabetes. 
 
 "We learned in the last decade you could prevent diabetes. The lifestyle changes and education are not easy and it takes a while, but I think that's what we're seeing," Gregg said. 
 
 There's still a lot to be done, though, he added. 
 
 "Our incidence rate is 60 percent higher than it was back in the early nineties. If we use that as a benchmark of where we could be and should be, we have a long way to go," Gregg said. He is presenting the new data at a diabetes conference in Vancouver on Wednesday. ||||| About half of American adults have either diabetes or prediabetes, a new study says. 
 
 In 2011 to 2012, more than 12 percent of U.S. adults had diabetes, and 38 percent had prediabetes, a condition in which blood sugar levels are abnormally high, the study found. 
 
 In addition, more than one-third of people with diabetes were undiagnosed, meaning they didn't know they had the condition. The percentage of people with undiagnosed diabetes was particularly high among Asian Americans — about 50 percent of Asian Americans with diabetes were not aware they had the condition, according to the study. 
 
 "By learning more about who has diabetes — and who has the disease but does not know it — we can better target research and prevention efforts," Dr. Griffin Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), said in a statement. "We have treatments to help people with diabetes, but treatments can only help those who have been diagnosed." [5 Diets That Fight Diseases] 
 
 Diabetes is a major cause of death in the United States, the researchers said. The condition also increases people's risk of heart disease and stroke and, if left untreated, can cause complications including nerve damage, kidney failure and blindness. Most cases of diabetes are type 2, in which the body's cells stop responding to the hormone insulin, which results in a buildup of sugar in the bloodstream. 
 
 In the new study, the researchers analyzed information from more than 26,000 U.S. adults who took part in surveys between 1988 and 2012. Participants were asked whether they had ever been diagnosed with diabetes, and they also gave blood samples so that the researchers could check the participants' blood sugar levels. 
 
 During the study period, the percentage of people with diabetes increased from less than 10 percent in the 1988-1994 period, to more than 12 percent in 2011-2012. This rise in diabetes parallels an increase in obesity — the most important risk factor for type 2 diabetes, the researchers said. 
 
 However, the prevalence of diabetes changed little between 2007 and 2012, which may reflect a leveling of obesity rates that occurred around the same time, the researchers noted. 
 
 Diabetes was most common among older adults — about one in three adults age 65 and over had the condition in 2011-2012, compared to 17 percent of adults ages 45 to 64, and 5 percent of adults younger than 45. 
 
 About one-third of whites with diabetes (32 percent) did not know they had the condition, compared to 37 percent of blacks, 49 percent of Hispanics and 51 percent of Asian Americans. 
 
 One reason for the high percentage of undiagnosed diabetes among Asian Americans may be that people in this ethnic group often develop type 2 diabetes at a lower body mass index (BMI) than people of other ethnic groups. This means that doctors may not screen Asian Americans for diabetes when, in fact, they could be at risk for the disease, the researchers said. 
 
 "The large proportion of people with undiagnosed diabetes points to both a greater need to test for type 2 diabetes and a need for more education on when to test for type 2 diabetes, especially since populations such as Asian Americans may develop type 2 at a lower body mass than other groups," study co-author Catherine Cowie, director of diabetes epidemiology programs at NIDDK, said in a statement. 
 
 The researchers hope that future studies will provide more information about which subgroups of people are at highest risk for underdiagnoses. 
 
 The researchers noted that the American Diabetes Association recommends that people have two tests to confirm a diagnosis of diabetes. But in the new study, the researchers often had information from just one blood test. This means that some participants may have been classified as having diabetes when they didn't have the condition, the researchers said. 
 
 The study is published in the Sept. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. 
 
 Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| A three-year-old American girl has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes -- a condition linked to obesity -- making her one of the youngest people ever detected with the disease. 
 
 Type 2 diabetes used to be known as "adult-onset" because it is most common among the middle-aged and elderly, but in the last two decades increasing numbers of children have succumbed, due to poor diets and lack of exercise. 
 
 Details of the case are being presented on Thursday at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Stockholm by Michael Yafi, director of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Texas, Houston. 
 
 Since there is no global registry, it is not possible to say definitively that the girl is youngest patient ever but Yafi said his own research had not revealed any other cases in this age group. 
 
 "I'm sure there probably are others but they are either undiagnosed or not reported yet," he told Reuters. 
 
 Diabetes is a growing problem worldwide with the number of diabetics estimated to be 387 million in 2014 and forecast to soar to 592 million by 2035, according to the International Diabetes Federation (IDF). 
 
 "This is a global problem," Yafi said. "Type 2 diabetes is no longer limited to adults. Now when I see any obese child I screen the patient for type 2 diabetes." 
 
 For the Hispanic toddler who presented at his Houston clinic, the main symptoms were excessive urination and thirst, although her past medical history was unremarkable. However, both her weight of 35 kilos (77 pounds) and her body mass index were in the top 5 percent of all children her age. 
 
 Tests quickly showed she had high blood sugar levels but she tested negative for antibodies that would have signaled type 1 diabetes, the auto-immune version of the disease that is usually diagnosed in childhood in which the body does not produce insulin. 
 
 She was put on a diet and given a liquid version of the drug metformin, since she had trouble swallowing tablets, and after six months she had lost weight and was able to come off treatment. 
 
 Yafi said the case showed that type 2 diabetes could be reversed in children by early diagnosis, appropriate therapy and changes in lifestyle. 
 
 IDF estimates that diabetes costs healthcare systems worldwide more than $600 billion a year and sales of diabetes treatments are big business for drugmakers such as Novo Nordisk, Sanofi and Eli Lilly. 
 
 (Editing by Mark Potter)
– Some big news in America's public health arena: The number of new cases of diabetes is clearly falling for the first time in 25 years, reports the New York Times. Stats released Tuesday by the CDC show a nearly 20% drop from 2008 to 2014 in what the newspaper calls "the first sustained decline" since diabetes began booming in the 1990s. Specifically, the US saw 1.4 million new cases in 2014, down from 1.7 million in 2008. There's still plenty of major trouble spots: The decline is pronounced among white people and less so for AfricanAmericans and Hispanics, and a notable gap remains in regard to education levels. "It's not yet time for a parade," says the head of the diabetes program at Massachusetts General Hospital. But, he adds, "It has finally entered into the consciousness of our population that the sedentary lifestyle is a real problem, that increased body weight is a real problem." CBS notes that 10% of adults in the US are believed to have type 2 diabetes and that more than a third have prediabetes—a condition that can lead to the full disease—which makes any sign that the numbers have peaked welcome. A CDC researcher calls the results "a little surprising" given the decades-long increases. But "it seems pretty clear now that incidence rates have actually started to drop." (Meanwhile, a novel new treatment could one day make daily insulin injections a thing of the past.)