New study from myself and team on diabetes rates in hospitals and primary care It's pretty scary stuffhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168822718318862 …
But even this doesn't fix the first problem - if people aren't being tested, and aren't being diagnosed, they won't know if they have diabetes
-
-
Local and international estimates put the rate of undiagnosed diabetes at 20-30% of all people with the disease We've actually got some more research coming out soon that agrees with this figure (stay tuned)pic.twitter.com/dF5gPYeVYp
Show this thread -
So we wanted to know what the rate of diabetes in our hospitals was Not a population estimate, but useful to track the change in prevalence over time
Show this thread -
This is the idea of health surveillance - it's really hard/expensive to measure the true population prevalence of something, but if you can track changes over time, you know which way the problem is headingpic.twitter.com/r3FqQdyZyy
Show this thread -
So we implemented a diabetes test for every person coming into the ED at 2 hospitals who was already going to have a blood test About 40% of all people walking through the doors We've now tested nearly 90,000 people
Show this thread -
The results of the tests speak for themselves 17% consistent with diabetes 30% consistent with pre-diabetes only 53% in the normal rangepic.twitter.com/yLCcFlCjaS
Show this thread -
Now THIS IS NOT A PREVALENCE ESTIMATE The population of people getting tests is highly selected. These are people coming into the hospital and sick enough to need a blood test But it's still far higher than we were expecting
Show this thread -
I know what you're thinking, because we thought it too: "hospitals aren't really reflective of the general population. Everyone who goes there is sick, so this isn't surprising at all!" Which is why we didn't stop therepic.twitter.com/OQUGq4Xkhg
Show this thread -
Next we went out to a group of general practices across quite a large geographic area We implemented a similar testing regimen (people who were already getting bloods had an HbA1c added) And guess what? We found the EXACT SAME NUMBERSpic.twitter.com/ZfPMnlBMFU
Show this thread -
Even worse, there's every indication that the rate of diabetes is increasing, although it's hard to tell if this is because more people have diabetes or because we are getting better at identifying itpic.twitter.com/kb4valHU5J
Show this thread -
What does this all mean? Well, firstly, there are probably a lot more people with diabetes than we thought
Show this thread -
The exact figure is hard to know, but we estimate it to be between 11-13%
Show this thread -
The rate of diabetes also seems to be growing at quite a scary rate Regardless of whether this is due to improved testing or a true increase in the number of people who have the disease, it means we are going to see more diabetes in hospital and primary care
Show this thread -
Last but not least, it shows that targeted testing for diabetes can be a good way to improve detection
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.