Abstract
The American Diabetes Association and European Association for the Study of Diabetes issued a new patient-centered approach for the management of hyperglycemia in patients with Type 2 diabetes. With a focus on older adults and the elderly, the authors explored the alignment of elements of the suggested framework with patients’ reports of receiving combination or monotherapy using US national survey data (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001–2010) and a physician survey. Combination therapy was positively associated with age (range: 1.56–1.63; p = 0.04–0.07), obesity (odds ratio [OR]: 1.40; p = 0.01), HbA1c ≥7.0 (OR: 2.00; p < 0.01), number of years of living with diabetes (OR: 1.02 per year; p = 0.01) and hyperlipidemia (OR: 1.36; p = 0.02). An interaction term between years of living with diabetes and comorbidities >1 pointed to a trend of those with comorbidities >1 to be less probable to report combination therapy (OR: 0.98; p = 0.07) per additional year of diabetes history. Results suggest that sicker, older patients might benefit from more aggressive therapy, in the context of diabetes prevalence, this is expected to continue rising in that population.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that helped to improve the presentation of our findings.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.