New research into early diagnosis of diabetes and preventing ketoacidosis
Originally published Monday 12th October 2015
A team from Cardiff and Swansea Universities has successfully obtained funding from the NovoNordisk Foundation to examine how children and young people interact with their GP in the six months before diagnosis. The ultimate aim of this research is to enable earlier diagnosis of type 1 diabetes (T1D) in childhood to reduce the risk of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) at presentation.
The time period is known as the ‘prodrome’ of developing diabetes. The research will focus on understanding the pathway to diagnosis through analysis of the number and reason for appointments with the Primary Care Team before diagnosis and any tests conducted at these times.
This study will link the SAIL databank and the Brecon Group data to explore whether there are any factors or combinations of factors that are associated with a new diagnosis of T1D, as compared to children presenting with other acute conditions in the 12 months before diagnosis. It will also explore differences in the patient pathway between patients presenting with newly diagnosed T1D who experienced DKA, and those who did not.
In recent years, The Brecon Group database has been embedded and linked anonymously with a wider set of databases held within SAIL in Swansea University allowing important, informative and statistically robust analyses that link children and young people on the Brecon Group database with data held in other databases.
These sorts of studies are only possible because of the high quality of our Brecon Group database and its near complete coverage of all known cases. The research team is therefore most grateful to Brecon Group members for registering all new cases without which this sort of work cannot be undertaken.
For further information about this study please contact either Julia Townson or Prof John Gregory.
Notes
The full research title for this is: Investigating the prodrome of type 1 diabetes in childhood as it presents to Primary Care to predict earlier diagnosis and reduce ketoacidosis at presentation, using linked SAIL databank and Brecon Group data.
An example of research based on links between SAIL and Brecon Group data is Sayers A et al. Evidence for a persistent, major excess in all cause admissions to hospital in children with type-1 diabetes: results from a large Welsh national matched community cohort study. BMJ Open. 2015;5:e005644. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-005644).