Even as a lot of stress is given on regular screening for diabetes, a first-ever study has revealed that screening for type 2 diabetes does not appear to affect overall population mortality rates.
Published in the Lancet, the randomised trial, evaluated the effect of type 2 diabetes screening programmes on overall mortality rate in a population.
Experts assessed the number of deaths over 10 years in a group of more than 20,000 patients across 32 general practices in Eastern England.
The patients, all aged between 40 and 69 years, were assessed as being at high risk of diabetes.
Researchers allocated the practices participating in the trial to one of three groups: a group where one round of screening was followed up by routine care for patients diagnosed with diabetes; a group where one round of screening was followed up by intensive management of patients diagnosed with diabetes; and a control group where no screening took place. They then tracked the mortality rates in the patients studied over a period of 9.6 years on average.
The authors of the study found that overall mortality was not reduced in the groups where screening took place. They also found no significant difference between the screened and non-screened groups in the number of deaths specifically attributable to diabetes, cardiovascular illness, cancer, or other causes.
According to Dr Simon Griffin of the MRC Epidemiology Unit at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, UK, “The high proportion of undiagnosed cases of diabetes, the substantial number of patients with complications at clinical diagnosis, and the long latent phase of the disease are strong arguments for screening. However, in the large UK sample that we studied, screening for type 2 diabetes in patients at increased risk of the disease was not associated with any reduction in mortality within ten years.”