March 09, 2024
One Health Trust’s Drs. Amit Summan, Arindam Nandi, and Ramanan Laxminarayan co-authored a retrospective modeling study informed by data from eight low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). They found that across these eight countries, 6.7 (95% confidence interval: 3.4-11.3) million COVID-19 hospitalized patients (21.1%; 95% CI: 13.4-30.1%) had undiagnosed diabetes, of which 1.9 million patients died. Based on their modeling estimates, 1.7 (95% uncertainty interval: -3.0- 5.9) percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 5.0 (95% UI: -0.9-14.1) percent of COVID-19 deaths in these eight countries could have been prevented if these patients had been diagnosed and treated for diabetes prior to the pandemic at the same rate as the general diabetes patient population.
Currently, an estimated 45 percent of individuals with diabetes globally are unaware of their disease status. Timely detection of diabetes in LMICs is crucial to mitigating the burden of non-communicable diseases in a pandemic setting.
Read the full article published in eClinicalMedicine here.
