While the world's population is now approaching eight billion people, more than half a billion people suffer from diabetes, or more than 6 percent of the population.The number of diabetics in the world is 537 million, 90 percent of whom have type 2 diabetes, which in the past was called "geriatric diabetes." But this label will soon become a thing of the past because the incidence of type 2 diabetes is on the rise among young people, Chinese epidemiologists warn in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Jinxi Shi of the Department of Epidemiology at Harbin University in China and his co-authors wrote in the prestigious British Medical Journal last week that from 1990 to 2019, an increase in the incidence of type 2 diabetes was observed among adolescents and young adults around the world. This was reported by the Tiroler Tageszeitung newspaper and several German websites. In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas produces insulin in abundance, but the body's cells do not accept it in what is known as "insulin resistance."This is in contrast to type 1, in which the pancreas does not produce sufficient amounts of insulin because the immune system attacks the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas.In the past, type 2 diabetes usually affected older people.