Reports: Diabetes could affect 1-in-3 Miss. residents by 2030, physician says

NEW YORK — A physician in Mississippi is warning that one-third of the state's population could have diabetes in less than two decades, according to published reports.

The Guardian interviewed Richard deShazo of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, quoting him as saying that about a third of the population would have diabetes by 2030.

According to the 2013 edition of "F as in Fat," an annual report put out by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 12.5% of Mississippi adults have diabetes, the second-highest rate in the country after West Virginia. That report forecasts that the 284,269 cases of diabetes Mississippi had in 2010 could increase to 415,353 by 2030.

And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all of the states with rates of diabetes of at least 10% as of 2010 were in the South: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia, along with Puerto Rico. Overall, the south had a median age-adjusted diabetes prevalence of 9.8%, compared with 7.5% in the Midwest and 7.3% each in the Northeast and West.