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Mission of the Stark Diabetes Center
The Nelda C. and H.J. Lutcher Stark Diabetes Center at the University of
Texas Medical Branch is committed to leadership in diabetes care,
education and research.
Strategic objectives of the center are to provide multidisciplinary,
state-of-the-art health care to people with diabetes in Southeast Texas;
to develop a diabetes education program that not only serves patients in
Southeast Texas but throughout the state through telehealth technology; to
foster basic research in diabetes on campus and expand these efforts into
nationally recognized programs.
Your generous gift to the Stark Diabetes Center will help expand our
telehealth infrastructure to link the center with even more communities
across the state and establish a diabetes wellness program to better serve
the health needs of our patient population.
Make a gift now.
Diabetes Facts |
- According to the
American Diabetes Association,
nearly 16 million people in the United States have diabetes. Some
10.3 million of those have been diagnosed while another 5.4
million are unaware that they have diabetes.
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Diabetes is the seventh leading
cause of death in America, having claimed 64, 751 lives in 1998.
The disease accounts for 18% of all deaths in people 25 years or
older.
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Since the 1950s, the number of
diabetes cases in the U.S. have increased five fold. Nationally,
some 800,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. In Texas, in 1997,
an estimated 6.5% (865,347) of adults have been diagnosed with the
disease.
- The long-term consequences of this
chronic disease are considerable. It is the leading cause of
blindness, renal failure and nontraumatic amputations in adults
and reduces the life expectancy of middle-aged individuals by five
to 10 years.
- Those with diabetes are two to four
times more likely to develop some form of cardiovascular disease
and their risk of stroke is 2.5 times greater than that of the
general population.
- Diabetes is the single most frequent
reason for physician visits, utilization of hospital outpatient
facilities and hospitalization.
- Health care, lost productivity and
other costs directly and indirectly related to diabetes treatment
reached $98 billion in 1997.
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A
recent study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical
Association reported that diabetes cases in the United States
rose 48% over the last decade.
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