Characteristics of diabetes mellitus patients in Turkey: An analysis of national electronic health records

Background/aim: It was estimated that there were 537 million people with diabetes mellitus in 2021, representing 10.5% of the global adult population. Diabetes prevalence in Turkey is 13.5%, according to a meta-analysis and 17.3% according to a recent study. Although the primary purpose of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is clinical, researchers can use them to conduct epidemiologic investigations. This study aims to document the prevalence of diabetes and to evaluate the healthcare utilization of people with diabetes compared to the people without diabetes, based on national EHR.Methods: Only people over 14 years old were included in the analysis. Our criteria for being diabetic were 1) having an HbA1c over 6.5% (48 mmol/mol), 2) having a prescription with DM diagnosis, ICD-10 codes E10-E14, or 3) having at least two fasting blood glucose measurements over 126 mg/dl.Results: At the end of 2020, there were 7,178,674 individuals with diabetes, with 11.12% prevalence, 13.10% in women while 9.12% in men. Age-adjusted healthcare facility admission per capita was 15.5 for people with diabetes, 9.5 for people without diabetes, while the number of prescriptions was 7.9 for people with diabetes while 4.5 for people without diabetes in 2019. The mean number of prescriptions containing antidiabetics was 2.88 per person with diabetes in 2019.Conclusion: Approximately 11% of Turkish people have diagnosed with diabetes. We estimate that about one-third of people with diabetes are undiagnosed and the majority of these people are men. The results show that such large databases have the capability of supplying a vast amount of information to the scientific community.