In spite of the fact that many diabetics take care of the wellbeing by taking medications and pursuing an effective, wellness lifestyle, diabetes survival rates don’t seem to be improving. According to emerging research, published in Population Health Metrics, more needs to be done to extend diabetic lives.
If you have diabetes or pre-diabetes (dysglycemia), it is recommended that you maintain a healthy weight, eat healthy foods, stay physically fit, and take certain medications to achieve target blood sugar levels. However, a new study – led by Andrew Stokes, a PhD student in demography at the Population Studies Centre at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia – has shown that while these approaches may improve health, survival rates for dysglycemic patients do not appear to be improving.
Alongside his colleague Neil Mehta from the Department of Global Health at Emory University in Atlanta, Stokes evaluated the numbers on 10,291 non-diabetic patients, 2,339 with pre-diabetes and 2,050 with diabetes. All subjects participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and were aged 35 to 74 at baseline. Stokes and Mehta compared the mortality rates of two populations—one from 1988 to 1994 and one from 1999 to 2002.
The mortality rate for individuals with pre-diabetes increased from 11.19 to 14.02 deaths per 1,000 person-years, and from 20.34 to 20.82 deaths per 1,000 person-years in people with diabetes. The study’s authors noted that the death rate change for those with diabetes and pre-diabetes was a ‘non-significant increase in mortality over time,’ but when compared to the decreasing death rate of populations with normal blood sugar or no diabetes, (7.81 to 6.04 deaths per 1,000 person-years) it was a different story.
According to Stokes, ‘We found that individuals with pre-diabetes and diabetes, taken together, experienced persistently higher mortality rates compared to the normo-glycaemic population during 1988-2006, with no evidence of a narrowing gap.’ He added that pre-diabetic people have not been officially diagnosed with diabetes, and so they are particularly vulnerable to premature death because they are not receiving treatment.
‘The lack of improvement in mortality in the dysglycemic population is concerning and suggests that individuals with pre-diabetes and diabetes should be an important focus of future interventions aimed at improving population health in the US,’ concluded the authors. ‘Future work should verify these findings in larger datasets and using more recent cohort experience. Trends should also be examined in more detail—by gender, race/ethnicity and separately for individuals with pre-diabetes versus diabetes,’ Stokes added.
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