The number of Americans being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes is soaring, threatening to overwhelm the medical system designed to pay for their medical care, a new analysis showed.

Type 2 diabetes is increasing not only in an aging population, but also in younger persons as well. The disease is also bringing with it high risks of complications such as blindness, kidney disease, eye disease and amputations.

Dr. Frank A. Sloan and colleagues from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina discovered that more and more people over 65 years old are being diagnosed with diabetes and in some cases the complications arising from this disease are actually increasing. Overall, nearly 90 percent of elderly people with the condition had some type of adverse outcome.

The researchers looked at data for more than 33,000 people diagnosed with diabetes in 1994, nearly 32,000 diagnosed in 1999, and more than 40,000 diagnosed in 2003, comparing them with two “control” groups of people without diabetes.

Sloan and his colleagues found that the prevalence of the disease rose by 23 percent between 1994 and 1995 and again between 2003 and 2004 and the prevalence of the disease overall grew by 62 percent among the elderly during the same period. These numbers are worrisome, the researchers say. If they continue to raise, the burden of financing and providing medical care for elderly people with diabetes may prove too much for the health care system.

“Taken to the extreme, there will soon be too many patients with diabetes to be individually treated and not enough money to pay for it all! Given these possibilities, primary prevention programs must be put in place before the diabetes of advancing age becomes a reality," said Frank Vinicor, MD, MPH of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in an editorial that accompanies the study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Moreover, the death rate within six years in elderly people with diabetes decreased by 8.3 percent compared with those who were not diagnosed and treated for the disease.

Dr. Spyros Mezitis, an endocrinologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City said that the study also points to the harsh need for preventive strategies.

"What we're doing is treating, and we're not treating the problem at the beginning. Already one-third of the budget for Medicare is for diabetes. This is an epidemic, and we're not doing much to prevent it, and we're not doing very well controlling it. It's going to get worse before it gets better," he said for the Washington Post.

An estimated 19 million to 20 million Americans have type 2 diabetes and about one-third of them don’t even know they have the disease, which is characterized by high levels of blood sugar, caused by the body’s inability to process the hormone insulin to transport blood sugar to cells for energy.