Modelling Diabetes: A summary

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Modelling Diabetes: A summary
Public Health Intelligence Occasional Bulletin No 11

Date of publication: March 2002

Diabetes has been identified as a priority health objective in the New Zealand Health Strategy, released by the Hon Annette King, Minister of Health, on 14 December 2000. Action being taken by the Ministry of Health to address this objective includes:

‘Diabetes 2000’, an initiative aimed at early intervention and improved chronic disease management for diabetes

the diabetes tool kit, a summary of evidence and set of tools for District Health Boards (DHBs) to improve diabetes prevention and management services

‘Healthy Action – Healthy Eating’, a strategy for nutrition, physical activity and healthy weight, which will contribute to diabetes prevention

obesity and physical activity tool kits, providing advice for DHBs on reducing the major risk factors for diabetes.

Interventions to reduce the burden of diabetes – whether aimed at primary prevention of the condition, early intervention to slow the progression of disease, or more effective treatment of micro- and macrovascular complications – will benefit from a better understanding of the epidemiology of diabetes in New Zealand.

To provide such information, the Ministry of Health has developed epidemiological models of the diabetes epidemic with three objectives:

to quantify the current mortality burden of diabetes

to provide internally consistent estimates of current diabetes incidence, prevalence, duration and mortality

to forecast future diabetes prevalence (and other parameters) reflecting demographic changes, epidemiological risk factor exposures (especially obesity), and health service developments.

Each objective is the topic of a separate report. The methods used for all three modelling objectives, and the key results obtained, are summarised in this overview report. However, the individual bulletins should be consulted for full details. This summary also includes a brief discussion of the policy implications and applications of these results, and an outline of possible future modelling work.

It is hoped that these models and forecasts will prove useful to a wide range of health professionals, agencies and groups concerned with funding, planning, delivering or evaluating diabetes-related policies, programmes and services. Comments on this report, and requests to run further scenarios on the model, are welcomed and should be sent to:

Public Health Intelligence,
Ministry of Health,
PO Box 5013,
Wellington,
or email martin_tobias@moh.govt.nz.

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