Epidemiology of micro- and macrovascular complications of type 2 diabetes in Korea

The prevalence of diabetes in Korea has increased six- to sevenfold over the past 40 years with its complications becoming major causes of morbidity and mortality. The rate of death among patients with diabetes is about twice as high as that among persons without diabetes and the most common cause of death is cardiovascular disease (30.6%). Despite the seriousness of diabetic complications, 30 to 70% of patients receive inadequate care, and only 40% of treated diabetic patients achieve the optimal control with HbA1c level <7% in Korea. In 2006, over 30 to 40% of patients with diabetes have microvascular complications and around 10% of them have macrovascular complications from our national data. Despite there are some debates about intensive glycemic control resulting in the deterioration of macrovascular complication, multifactorial treatment approaches including proper glycemic control are important to prevent diabetic complications. There have been needs for finding proper biomarkers for predicting diabetic complications properly but we still need more longitudinal studies to find this correlation with causal relationship. In this article, we wanted to review the recent status of micro- and macrovascular complications of type 2 diabetes in Korea from integration of many epidemiologic studies.