'Missing' Diabetes Patients Found

June 25, 2007 (Chicago) -- It sounds like a scene from Michael Moore's latest movie, Sicko -- but the question, and the answer, come from the CDC.

How is it possible, wondered CDC researcher Xuanping Zhang, PhD, that nearly 3% of Americans can have diabetes and not know it?

After all, these 6.2 million people represent a huge chunk of the nearly 21 million Americans -- 7% of the U.S. population -- with diabetes.

"There is a relationship between these missing patients with diabetes and lack of health care access," Zhang says. "Among people with diabetes, health care access is an important predictor for being undiagnosed."

To find out who these missing patients are, Zhang and colleagues used responses to national health surveys to track down 110 people who, to the patients' surprise, turned out to have diabetes. They compared them with 704 matched patients with known diabetes.

Zhang announced the findings at the American Diabetes Association's 67th Annual Scientific Sessions, held June 22-26 in Chicago. During his presentation, he often used the words "much lower chance" and "huge difference" to describe the missing patients' access to health care.

Compared with people who knew they had diabetes, those who had diabetes but didn't know it:

• Were more than 33 times more likely to have no routine place to go for health care
• Were more than 10 times less likely to have received any health care in the last year
• Were four times less likely to get health care in a consistent way
• Were 70% more likely to be uninsured
• Were 2.5 times more likely to be uninsured for longer than three years

"In order to prevent diabetes complications, we need to identify people with undiagnosed diabetes for appropriate treatments," Zhang said.

"Efforts to identify missed patients may need to address health care access issues," Zhang said.