The North American Region has the highest prevalence of diabetes among the IDF regions with 9.2%, or 28 million persons with diabetes in the adult population, for 2007 (see Table 1). The region is expected to continue to have the highest prevalence in 2025 when 10.8% of adults are anticipated to have diabetes.

Although the region comprises 24 countries and territories, 68% of the adult population reside in the United States of America (USA), with a further 21% living in Mexico and 8% in Canada, so that only 3% of the region’s adult population reside in the other 21 smaller nations. 

At a glance

Diabetes and IGT prevalence
The high prevalence of abnormal glucose tolerance for Canada and the USA are very much a consequence of their older age distribution, such that 30% of their population are over 50 years of age, and expected to be 36% by 2025   1 . This is in contrast to 16% of those over 50 years of age increasing to 26% for Mexico, and 20% increasing to 28% for the Caribbean.

The data published in Tables 1 and 2 indicate the expected number of persons with impaired fasting glucose (IFG) for Canada and the USA, based on the data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2000   2 , which based assessment on the fasting glucose. NHANES III data   3  suggested that IGT prevalence was about 50% higher than for IFG, on which basis about 18 million Americans were likely to affected by IGT in 2007 (9% prevalence), and nearly 25 million in 2025.

As all the Caribbean islands other than Barbados, Guadeloupe and Martinique had their estimates extrapolated from Jamaican data   4 , the differences in prevalence are a consequence only of different age distributions for the islands.

There were new studies of diabetes prevalence used for USA   5  and Mexico   6   7 , which hardly affected the USA estimate, but somewhat increased that for Mexico.