Undiagnosed Diabetes

Apparently, there are more than 6 million American adults completely unaware that they have diabetes mellitus. And, according to a report in the research journal Population Health Management their undiagnosed health problems cost an estimated $18 billion each year.

Yiduo Zhang from the Lewin Group, Falls Church, Virginia, and colleagues at Ingenix Pharmainformatics, Cary, North Carolina, and Ingenix Research, Basking Ridge, New Jersey, studied the healthcare use patterns of a group of people during a two-year period leading up to a diagnosis of diabetes. They then used these findings as the basis for economic estimates to work out how many other people may also have diabetes but are yet to be diagnosed.

The team reports that the healthcare costs associated with diabetes begin to increase at least eight years before diagnosis and grow at a faster rate shortly before and after diagnosis.

“Diabetes is one of the most devastating chronic diseases and costs the nation billions of dollars,” says the journal’s Editor-in-Chief David Nash of Jefferson School of Population Health, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

One can only hope that such estimates of latent diabetes are not another symptom of the medicalization of our lives. I assume not, but you never know…

Zhang, Y., Dall, T., Mann, S., Chen, Y., Martin, J., Moore, V., Baldwin, A., Reidel, V., & Quick, W. (2009). The Economic Costs of Undiagnosed Diabetes Population Health Management, 12 (2), 95-101 DOI: 10.1089/pop.2009.12202