Prevalence of Comorbidities among Patients with Diabetes

Abstract

Objectives: The patients with diabetes often have one or more comorbidities. To make a clinical decision for the choice of medicine as well as to manage chronic diseases, understanding individual or combination of comorbidities is necessary. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of comorbidities in diabetes patients. Methods: The comorbidities was defined to include obesity, hypertension (HTN), anemia, dyslipidemia, liver disease or kidney disease. This study included 212,608 adults with diabetes defined as fasting blood glucose ≥ 126 mg/dL, hemoglobin A1c ≥ 6.5% or individuals who have taken anti-diabetes medication, from 16 health promotion centers in Korea from January 2014 to Decemver 2015. Data was summarized by descriptive analyses on the combinations of comorbidity of condition by subgroups of age and sex. Results: Of the Korean adults with diabetes, 88% had one or more comorbidity. The highest prevalence of individual comorbidity was 50.5% in hypertension, followed 50% in obesity, 47.1% in dyslipidemia, 25.7% in liver disease and 14.8% in kidney disease. Comorbid conditions such as HTN, anemia and kidney disease tended to increase in older age group. Most of individual comorbidities were similaror higherin men except for hypertensionand anemia. In addition, 67.3% of the participants had at least two comorbidities with diabetes. The comorbidity burden of the diabetes patients with obesity and other disease was high; 28.8% in obesity and HTN, 26.0% in obesity and dyslipidemia. Conclusions: There is a high prevalence of comorbidity of two or more diseases including obesity or HTN among diabetes patients. To effectively treat and manage diabetes, there should be careful consideration about the presence of multi-morbidity and approach to health promotion including chronic disease management. It is identical to the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) whichpermit sunrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported. 가에서 7위에 해당하였고, 일본이 6.5명인 것과 큰 차이가 있었다[3]. 당뇨병의 증가는 관련된 질환의 유병 현황에 영향을 미친다. 당뇨병 환 자에서 고혈압 혹은 이상지질혈증 약물을 복용하는 비율은 연간 증가 하고 있으며, 특히 이상지질혈증 약물복용률은 2006년 27.8%에서 2013년 49.5%로 큰 폭으로 변화하는 양상을 보였다[4]. 또한 최근 10년 간 당뇨병 환자의 평균 체질량지수(body mass index, BMI)는 지속적으 로 증가하고 있으며, 1989-1990년 21.9 kg/m 2 에서 2007-2010년 25.2 kg/ m 2 로 높아졌다[5,6].