Men's diabetes deaths decline

WASHINGTON -- The death rate for men with diabetes has fallen sharply in the United States since the early 1970s even as more people develop the disease, but women are not making the same progress, researchers said yesterday.

The researchers speculated that women might not be getting the same care for heart disease as men. Diabetes is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States.

Researchers tracked about 27,000 people ages 35 to 74 in three national databases during three time periods from 1971 to 2000.

Death rates from all causes for men with diabetes dropped from 42.6 per 1,000 people annually from 1971 to 1986, to 24.4 per 1,000 in the period from 1988 to 2000, the study found. Their deaths from cardiovascular disease, the biggest killer of diabetics, fell dramatically.

"Among men, we see very encouraging trends in death rates among the diabetic population," Edward Gregg, an epidemiologist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and lead author of the study, said in a telephone interview. ...more