The Cultural War on Diabetes - There’s an epidemic underway in this country, and minority communities are being hit hard. How two Los Angeles doctors are finding new ways to help.

“The teenager had the kind of story Drs. Francine Kaufman and Anne Peters hear far too often. Adrian Rivera was a chunky but active 15-year-old when he returned to California in late 2004 after two energetic years living on an uncle’s ranch in Mexico. But activity turned to torpor as Rivera sat around the house in Whittier, Calif., waiting for school to start. “All I did was eat, sleep and play my PlayStation and Game Boy,” recalls Adrian, now 17. In just two months, the 5-foot-9 teen’s weight shot from 192 pounds to 255. Alarmed, his parents took him to the family doctor, who diagnosed type 2 diabetes.

Now a patient at Kaufman’s pediatric-diabetes clinic, Rivera is another statistic in the nation’s diabetes epidemic. The disease is hitting minority communities hard: nearly half of all African-American and Latino children born in 2000 are expected to become diabetic at some time in their lives, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The ratio for all Americans born that year is expected to be one in three.) Which is why Kaufman and Peters, both from the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, are rushing to find innovative treatments for current patients””and effective prevention regimens to keep at-risk populations from becoming diabetic. “We are at the vortex of the obesity and type 2 diabetes explosion,” says Kaufman, a past president of the American Diabetes Association.”

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