Screening for diabetes and cardiovascular disease does not noticeably reduce mortality rates – but does help those diagnosed with diabetes, according to major research studies published last night.
Countries such as Denmark and the UK seek to screen middle-aged people for glycaemic and cholesterol levels.
British and Danish researchers have worked together to analyse a long-established programme in Denmark over a nine-year period.
The programme began in five of the country’s sixteen counties, allowing researchers to compare the impact of screening and not screening.
Reporting in Diabetologia, the researchers say that screening showed no impact on mortality rates or cardiovascular events by 2012.
But they also found that those diagnosed with diabetes in areas with screening enjoyed a 21% reduction in risk of dying and a 16% reduction in cardiovascular events. But only 10% of these were diagnosed through screening.
They concluded that screening brought forward the average age of diagnosis with diabetes by a little over two years.
Researcher Dr Rebecca Simmons of the Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Denmark, and the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, UK, said: "Screening appears to offer beneficial effects for all those diagnosed with diabetes, regardless of whether they were screen detected or clinically diagnosed.
"But this benefit is too small to have an impact on overall population risk of heart disease and stroke, for example, or on early death."
Diabetologia 23 August 2017 [abstract]
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