To examine if diabetes affects the seniors mortality from pneumonia, the US NHANES Ⅲ follow-up study data was used.After cleaning those who were other minorities, had been hospitalized for pneumonia in previous year or whose death cause was due to pneumonia during the first year of follow-up, a total of 3707 aged 65 years or older seniors (1794 men and 1913 women) who had no missing information on variables for the analysis were included in this report.Diabetes was defined at the baseline as either having been diagnosed as diabetes by a physician or current taking insulin or pills to lowering blood glucose or HbA lc higher than 6.5 at the baseline.16.4% of subjects in this sample were identified as having diabetes.During approximately average 10.7 years follow-up, a total of 98 deaths were recorded as due to pneumonia (ICD-10:J12-J18) with a mortality rate at 2.2 per 10,000 person year.After adjustment for the covariates at the baseline, which include age, gender, ethnicity, cigarette smoking, education, BMI, diastolic blood pressure, comorbidity (heart attack, cancers, hypertension or stroke), health status, other respiratory problems (asthma, chronic bronchitis, wheezing or whistling during last year), and whether blood glucose being controlled, the result from Cox-regression analysis showed that in comparing to those without diabetes, the hazard ratio of dying from pneumonia was 2.67 (95% confidence interval: 1.18, 6.05, p-value<0.05) for those seniors with diabetes.This suggests that diabetes in seniors is an important risk for pneumonia mortality.