The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced that diabetes case numbers are on their first sustained decline since 2009, ars technica reports.

The CDC has used its  newly released data from 2014 for the announcement. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million.

The downslide in the number of diabetes cases has come after more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates.

"It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop," said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC's top diabetes researchers told the New York Times.

"Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked."

From the years 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million cases a year in patients aged 18 to 79.

However, since 2009, diabetes case numbers have come down, though the decline had not registered as being significant statistically.

Experts are not sure the reasons that are responsible for the decline. The decline can be attributed to effective health campaigns and the fact that Americans are eating healthier.