Diabetes Prevalence Higher Among Arab Americans Than General U.S. Population
The prevalence of diabetes among Arab Americans is "much higher" than in the general U.S. population because Arab Americans have "adopted a sedentary lifestyle and the bad habits in American society of eating unhealthy snacks and junk food," according to a study by the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, the Detroit News reports. The study, funded by the American Diabetes Association, clinically tested 542 randomly selected Arab men and women ages 20 to 75 in Dearborn, Mich., and found that 15.5% of the women and 20% of the men had diabetes. About 6.2% of the general U.S. adult population has diabetes. Dr. Adnan Hammad, study author and director of the health center at ACCESS, said that the longer Arab Americans live in the United States, the higher their risk for diabetes becomes because they tend to replace their homeland diets of fruit and vegetables with fatty foods and adopt a sedentary lifestyle. "The significance of this study is it's the first epidemiology study that deals with Arab-American adults. Before we were guessing," Hammad said, adding, "Diabetes patients need counseling and education. We need research on the effectiveness of controlling diabetes, especially for the low-income and uninsured" (Moore, Detroit News, 9/2).
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