Another day, another depressing health-related news story. Thanks, Forbes, for today's Scary Statistic! With the ominous headline, "Diabetes Brings Earlier Heart Disease, Death," Forbes reports that a new study shows Type 2 diabetics are likely to suffer fatal and non-fatal heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular "events" (my favorite health euphemism!) around fifteen years sooner than non-diabetics. Oh, yikes. That is a scary statistic.

The information comes courtesy of researchers at the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, Canada. The results of the study have been published in the latest issue of The Lancet (July 2006). The study found that you can roughly pinpoint the ages at which people cross over into the "moderate risk" and "high risk" categories for heart problems. For diabetics, this crossover point came about fifteen years earlier than for others.

For Type 2 men "moderate risk" was reached at just under thirty-nine years of age, as opposed to age fifty-five for non-diabetic men. "High risk" was reached at around forty-nine years, instead of sixty-two for non-diabetic men. For Type 2 women, "moderate risk" was reached at around forty-six years, as opposed to sixty-two for non-diabetics, while "high risk" for women began at at fifty-six, instead of sixty-nine for non-diabetics.

Worst of all, the researchers report that Type 2 diabetics who were at moderate or high risk for heart disease died an average of eighteen years earlier than non-diabetics.

The solution? Experts say physicians need to take the lead in pushing their Type 2 diabetic patients to get active and lose weight.