The number of Americans diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has now topped 19 million, and a new study says a third of adults with the disease don’t even know they have it. The researchers found that another 26 percent of adults had ‘impaired fasting glucose,’ a precursor to diabetes. ‘So, if you add that together with the 9.3 percent of people with diabetes, that means that fully one-third of the adult population — 73 million Americans — have diabetes or they may be on their way to getting it,’ said lead researcher Catherine Cowie, director of the diabetes epidemiology program at the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Her team’s report appears in the June issue of Diabetes Care. The researchers note that about 95 percent of all cases of diabetes in the United States fall under the category of type 2 disease — a gradual loss of insulin production and sensitivity that’s usually linked to overweight and obesity. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, survey data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 1988 to 1994 and […]