Introduction: Every year official data is published which describes the care of patients with diabetes mellitus in the Czech Republic. An overall number of individuals with diabetes, the number of newly reported cases and the number of patient deaths is always specified. However this data does not allow us to identify the differences in mortality between the individual cohorts of diabetic patients in relation to therapy.
Goal: Comparison of the mortality development in the periods of 2002-2006 and 2010-2013 in a representative sample of the patient population with type 2 diabetes mellitus using oral antidiabetic drugs, kept in the database of the General Health Insurance Company of the Czech Republic (VZP) which provided health care coverage for 63% of Czech population in 2013.
Methodology: A retrospective epidemiologic analysis. We identified all individuals in the VZP database who had a record of DM diagnosis (E10-E16 based on ICD 10) or who had any antidiabetic therapy prescribed (ATC group A10) in the periods of 2002-2008 and 2009-2013. We only selected those patients for the analysis who were treated with oral antidiabetic medicines (in the given year or the preceding years they had a record of treatment with at least one medicine from A10B group, while having no record of treatment with medicines from A10A group within both years). 237,665 individuals met the selected criteria in 2003 and 315,418 individuals in 2013.
Results: Mortality rates dropped for all age groups (from 2003-2013): for 50-59 year olds by 1.2%-0.7%; in 60-69 year olds by 2.6%-1.6%; for 70-79 year olds by 5.8%-3.5%. In 2013 mortality rates came close to the general population where for the same age groups they reached 0.6%, 1.5% and 3.4% respectively. When expressed in relative terms, the mortality among 50-59 year olds declined by 42% (Czechia by 25%), among 60-69 year olds by 39% (Czechia by 17%) and among 70-79 year olds by 40% (Czechia by 28%) from the year 2003. The decline in mortality among the patients with DM treated with oral antidiabetic medicines was greater in both absolute and relative terms in the period of 2003-2013 than among the general population in the Czech Republic.
Conclusion: The analysis of mortality among the patients treated with oral antidiabetic medicines, registered in the VZP database, has shown a clearly favourable trend of mortality decline which is faster than among the general population. The fact that mortality among this cohort is getting closer to that among the general population of the corresponding age is a finding of critical importance. There is a justified expectation that mortality, with increasingly extensive utilization of the present therapeutic procedures, will continue to decrease.