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Mahmood, Bushra; Li, Gordon; Li, Julia; Wilton, James; Tang, Tricia S.; Velásquez García, Héctor Alexander; Wong, Stanley; Jain, Akshay B.; Naveed, Zaeema; Garg, Arun; Nandra, Amandeep; Janjua, Naveed Zafar; McKee, Geoffrey

Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

Introduction: In British Columbia (BC), Canada, COVID-19 and associated control measures impacted routine care for patients with diabetes. Some of these measures may have impacted timely screening and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. We assessed the impact of control measures on screening and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in BC. Methods: We used data from the BC COVID-19 Cohort, which includes COVID-19 and healthcare administrative data on all residents of BC. We assessed and compared screening (≥40 yrs) and diagnosis (≥18 yrs) of diabetes among the adult population during the pandemic period (1 April 2020–31 December 2022), with 1 January 2016–31 March 2020 used as a historical reference period. We used interrupted time series with generalized additive models to evaluate the impact of policy measures on screening and diagnoses trends. Results: We observed an initial decline in the mean number of screenings and diagnoses. In the third post-policy phase (January 2022–December 2022), there was a 4.8% (−5.1, 15.4) increase in screenings while after an initial reduction in diabetes diagnoses, we observed a significant increase of 31.6% (17.8, 46.6) in the third post-policy phase. Further stratification by age and sex showed the entire increase in diagnoses trends was driven by younger females with a 56.4% (25.1, 92.9) and 58.7% (38.2, 81.3) increment in diagnoses in the 18–29 and 40–49 age groups, respectively. Conclusions: The initial reduced number of screenings and diagnoses followed by the significant upward trend in diabetes diagnoses in the later post-policy phase have important clinical and public health implications. Further research is needed to understand the post-pandemic increase in diabetes among females.

Article

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0448849

Medicine, Faculty of; Non UBC; Health and Exercise Sciences, School of (Okanagan); Medicine, Department of; Population and Public Health (SPPH), School of

10.3390/ijerph22040519

Faculty; Researcher

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