After rising for decades, the number of new cases of diabetes in the United States has leveled off and is finally started to decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The rate of new cases fell by about a fifth from 2008 to 2014, the first sustained decline since the disease started to explode in this country about 25 years ago, The New York Times reports.

According to the new CDC figures, 1.4 million new cases of diabetes were diagnosed in 2014, down from 1.7 million in 2008.

“It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers. “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.”

Experts cautioned that the proportion of Americans with diabetes was still double what it was in in the 1990s.