health
Diabetes (adults)
Why this matters
Diabetes in adults measures the share of adults who have been told by a health professional that they have diabetes (other than during pregnancy), a condition in which blood sugar stays too high. Most adult cases are type 2. On this platform these are modeled estimates that blend survey and population data, so they are best read as the level in each year, not as year-to-year change (the CDC does not support using them as a trend).
Diabetes matters because, left unmanaged, it can lead to heart disease, kidney failure, vision loss, and nerve damage, and it adds substantial cost to households and the health system.
These numbers reflect diagnosed cases, so they can undercount people who have diabetes but haven’t been tested. Access to care, affordable healthy food, and safe places to be active all influence who develops and who gets treated. In Mecklenburg County, chronic-disease outcomes like diabetes track the same crescent/wedge geography seen in income; the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and the Mecklenburg Community Health Assessment map these neighborhood gaps.
About the Charlotte region
This explorer covers the 14-county, two-state Charlotte region (11 North Carolina and 3 South Carolina counties). Many of these indicators connect to a defining regional story: a landmark Harvard study ranked Charlotte last, 50th of the 50 largest U.S. metros for economic mobility (a child raised in the poorest fifth had about a 4.4% chance of reaching the top fifth), a finding that launched the region's Leading on Opportunity agenda. Updated 2024 data show Charlotte has since climbed to 38th.
Opportunity here is also unevenly mapped. An affluent “wedge” fanning southeast from uptown holds a large majority of the city's wealth on under a quarter of its land, while a ”crescent” to the north, west, and east carries higher poverty, a legacy of redlining, exclusionary zoning, and highway routing that recurs across the race, income, health, tree-canopy, and school maps in this tool. No single indicator is good or bad on its own; together they describe how the region sorted opportunity.
Companion resources: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer · UNC Charlotte Urban Institute · Opportunity Atlas · Methods & sources
Learn more
- CDC — Diabetes Basics cdc.gov
What diabetes is, the main types, warning signs, and prevention.
- CDC PLACES — Compare counties places.cdc.gov
Interactive tool for model-based local estimates of diabetes and other measures.
- County Health Rankings — Diabetes Prevalence countyhealthrankings.org
The diagnosed-diabetes measure, why it matters, and its limits.
- Mecklenburg Community Health Assessment health.mecknc.gov
Local public-health data and neighborhood health disparities for Mecklenburg County.
About the data
Model-based small-area estimates from the CDC PLACES project (2018–2023), which uses BRFSS survey data and multilevel regression & poststratification to estimate adult prevalence for every Census tract. Each estimate has a confidence interval; values with high uncertainty are flagged.
Source: CDC PLACES (model-based small-area estimates).