In my last post I discussed what appear to be increased levels of anaemia in the country. Today I’ll discuss what appears to be an increase in the numbers of people with a dysfunctional ability of the blood to carry not oxygen but glucose – diabetes and precursor conditions.
While diabetes has been a known problem for centuries, it is in our modern age that it has become an endemic problem – in the UK approximately 10% of the population aged over 40 has diabetes, and there are thought to be around 1 million people who don’t even know they’re affected by the condition (with consequential damage to their bodily organs).
The GP data has the slightest hint that there might be an increased incidence of new diabetics in the country (squint a bit and you might see an increase in the slope of the graph from 2021):
Anti-diabetes drugs (https://openprescribing.net/bnf/060102/)
It might not look like much, but the slope of the graph (based on linear regression) in the post 2021 period is double of that before 2021.
Note that this data is for the number of prescriptions written for anti-diabetes drugs per month – it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more diabetics in the population (it could just mean the same number of diabetics being given more drugs). Also, it could be simply that a large number of people with undiagnosed diabetes decided to ‘look after their health’ in 2020 and found that they were affected with the condition during a trip to their GP. On the other hand, far too many GPs have spent the last 3 years making a simple visit to the GP that much more difficult, so I imagine that if there are more people becoming diabetic at the moment the graph above won’t necessarily give the full picture.
Diabetics need to regulate their blood sugar levels by carefully controlling their diet (and for some, carefully dosing themselves with insulin) – if blood sugar levels become too high or low they run the risk of becoming a medical emergency. For low blood sugar levels, hypoglycemia, the treatment is to eat anything that contains sugar/glucose and if attended to by medical personnel they will be given a glucose drink/tablet or potentially given an injection of glucose if warranted. As glucose is commonly used in hospitals there is no particular statistical signal in the hospital drugs database. For hyperglycemia, when blood sugar levels are too high, hospitals will give an injection of insulin; the hospital data suggests that the use of insulin increased markedly from around mid 2020:
That graph is for ‘insulin aspart’, a particularly fast acting variant of insulin. Other insulin types show a similar pattern in the increase in usage over the last 3 years.
Diabetes negatively affects many organs in the body, but arguably one of the problems that most impacts on quality of life is its impact on eyesight. Diabetics run a significantly increased risk of having glaucoma, a condition where the pressure within the eye becomes too high resulting in damage to the nerves of the eye and eventually blindness.
Data from hospital prescriptions for dispensing in a normal pharmacy suggest that eyedrops used for controlling glaucoma have seen increased demand since 2020. For example, take the data on emergency prescriptions for Cosopt (dorzolamide and timolol):
This pattern is seen with other glaucoma medications, such as Monopost (latanoprost). However, it might not simply be due to an increase in efforts to control glaucoma in diabetics – a similar pattern of increasing use is seen with prescriptions for acetazolamide, which is used for treating glaucoma but which isn’t particularly favoured for use by diabetics. Perhaps there is simply an increasing problem of high intraocular pressure in the population, independent of diabetes?
Studies have shown that there is a higher risk of diabetes forming in the period after Covid infection (eg, https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02656-y), and it is likely that these data on drug use reflect this increased incidence – that said, the changes seen in the hospital data indicate a higher incidence rate than suggested in the scientific research. Perhaps if China/USA (delete as appropriate) would tell us exactly what they were trying to achieve with their coronavirus research we’d have more idea of what goes on in the bodies of those infected with Covid.
The data presented in this post suggest that there might be an increase in the risk of diabetes in the population, and/or a decrease in the ability of diabetics to control their blood sugar levels. On the other hand, I noticed that over the lockdowns in 2020 an elderly aunt of mine developed a taste for iced doughnuts with sprinkles, a taste which hasn’t gone away now that we’ve supposedly returned to normal – perhaps it is simply that there are many like her in the population.