No increase in new users of blood glucose-lowering drugs in Norway 2006-2011: a nationwide prescription database study
Journal article, Peer reviewed
© 2014 strøm et al.; licensee bio med central ltd. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Date
2014-05-29Metadata
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Original version
Strøm, H., Selmer, R., Birkeland, K. I., Schirmer, H., Berg, T. J., Jenum, A. K., ... & Stene, L. C. (2014). No increase in new users of blood glucose-lowering drugs in Norway 2006-2011: a nationwide prescription database study. BMC Public Health, 14(1), 520. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-520Abstract
Background
National estimates for the occurrence of diabetes are difficult to obtain, particularly time trends in incidence. The aim was to describe time trends in prevalent and incident use of blood glucose-lowering drugs by age group and gender in Norway during 2005–2011.
Methods
Data were obtained from the nationwide Norwegian Prescription Database. We defined prevalent users of “insulins only” as individuals having no oral antidiabetic drugs (OAD) dispensed from a pharmacy during the previous 24 months or in the subsequent 12 months. Incident users had no blood glucose-lowering drugs dispensed in the previous 24 months; incident “insulins only” users also had no OAD in the subsequent 12 months.
Results
In 2011, 3.2% of the population had blood glucose-lowering drugs dispensed, and the incidence rate was 313 per 100,000 person years. The prevalence of OAD use increased from 1.8% in 2005 to 2.4% in 2011; however a decreasing trend in incidence of OAD use was observed, particularly in those aged 70 years and older. In 2010, 0.64% of the population had insulins only dispensed, with an overall incidence rate in the total population of 33 per 100,000 person years which was stable over time.
Conclusions
In this nationwide study, we found that although the prevalent use of OAD had increased in recent years, incident use was stable or had decreased. This may indicate that the increase in diabetes occurrence in Norway is levelling off, at least temporarily.