Economic Costs of Diabetes in the U.S. in 2022, published by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), reported a $412.9 billion total annual cost of diabetes for 2022, with people living with diabetes accounting for one of every four health care dollars spent in the United States. More than half of the diabetes-related expenditures can be attributed directly to diabetes and related complications. In addition to new therapies and devices, there is a persistent need for investigating interventions and strategies that can potentially prevent diabetes complications and mitigate their healthcare and cost burden.

The session Joint ADA/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Symposium—Pressure Points and Future Directions in the Prevention of Acute and Chronic Diabetes-Related Complications, to be held on Friday, June 21, from 3:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. ET in Room W307 of the Orange County Convention Center, will focus on recent trends and disparities in, as well as approaches for preventing, diabetes-related complications. The symposium also will be livestreamed on the virtual meeting platform for registered meeting participants and will be available on-demand following the 84^th Scientific Sessions.

Ryan Saelee, PhD, MPH, Epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), will present findings on recent trends in diabetes-related complications among U.S. adults, data for which are lacking after 2015.

Although rates of certain diabetes complications declined in the early 2000s, rates of diabetes-related heart failure, stroke, end-stage renal disease (ESRD), and nontraumatic lower-extremity amputations have increased over the last decade, Dr. Saelee said. He will provide an overview of the latest epidemiologic data on these trends, as well as those for myocardial infarction, diabetes-related retinopathy, and hyperglycemic crisis among U.S. adults with diagnosed diabetes from 2000 to 2020.

In addition, age, sex, and racial and ethnic inequalities have worsened for some diabetes complications, Dr. Saelee said. The most alarming findings, he noted, point to increasing diabetes complications among adults younger than 65, males, and non-Hispanic Black adults. Understanding trends in inequalities for each complication across age, race and ethnicity, and sex, is important for an understanding of the progress in reducing inequalities, he said.

“Our study is unique in that we used summary measures to monitor inequalities over time,” Dr. Saelee explained. “This method may provide an advantage over pairwise comparisons (comparing two groups to each other at a time during specific time periods) by accounting for changes in population size of each subgroup over time and by providing a single value to summarize the overall inequalities, which makes it simpler to communicate these findings to stakeholders.”

The joint symposium will include other speakers who will dive more deeply into specific complications and discuss various methods of diabetes self-management and care, as well as policy, systems, and environmental strategies for setting up for future population-level success in secondary diabetes prevention.

Joshua J. Joseph, MD, MPH, FAHA, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, will focus on the role of cross-stakeholder partnerships in improving cardiovascular health and mitigating cardiovascular risk among people with diabetes.

Francisco J. Pasquel, MD, MPH, Emory University, will review how care fragmentation can be improved to prevent diabetes-related microvascular complications.

Shivani A. Patel, PhD, Emory University, will also participate in the panel.