Diabetes: international comparisons
Statistics on diabetes in Scotland are based on population registers, a more accurate approach than estimates based on hospital admissions or mortality data. Steady improvements in the accuracy of diabetes registers in Scotland have been documented by the Scottish Diabetes Survey.
Comparing the prevalence of diabetes between countries is difficult because of the methods used for surveys are often not comparable. As a result, the comparisons of diabetes prevalence shown in the Scottish Health for All (HfA) Database on this site should be interpreted with considerable caution. An apparently lower prevalence of diabetes in some other European countries may simply reflect the fact that Scottish statistics are based on population registers and so are more complete than estimates based on mortality or hospital admissions.
Chart 1 shows figures from the global burden of disease study by Wild et al (2004), which used the most comparable survey results to estimate the prevalence of diabetes in various countries. The figure for Scotland was based on extrapolating figures from a survey in Holland. (Better quality data are available for Scotland, but they are not directly comparable with the surveys used for other countries.)
Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.
