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 ${\geq}126mg/dL$, hemoglobin A1c ${\geq}6.5%$ 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.

Keywords

• Diabetes;
• Comorbidities;
• Multimorbidity;
• Prevalence;
• Co-prevalence