Modelling Diabetes: Forecasts to 2011

Modelling Diabetes: Forecasts to 2011
Public Health Intelligence Occasional Bulletin No 10

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 a multi-state life table model of diabetes. Baseline results of this model for 1996 have been reported in a separate occasional bulletin Modelling Diabetes: A multi-state life table model. This model has now been used to forecast the burden of diabetes to 2011 (15 years from baseline). The forecasts reported here are based on scenarios reflecting future demographic trends (changes in the size, age structure and ethnic composition of the population) and likely epidemiological developments (increases in the incidence of diabetes driven by the current obesity epidemic, and decreases in the case fatality of diabetes resulting from improvements in health care technology and service delivery).

It is hoped that these 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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