Morbidity and mortality among diabetic patients admitted to Mulago Hospital, Uganda

To document the causes of admission, clinical presentation and outcome of patients admitted with diabetes mellitus to our medical wards.

Medical wards of Mulago Hospital, teaching hospital and national referral for the government of Uganda.

Cross-sectional descriptive non-interventional study of diabetic medical admissions.

During the study period 129 (4.2%) patients with diabetes mellitus out of 3103 total medical admissions were admitted. The commonest cause of admission was uncontrolled diabetes (48.3%) but infections were present in 27.7% of all the study patients. The commonest infections were pneumonia (15%) and urinary tract infections (11.8%). Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) was a cause of admission in 9.2% of all the study subjects. Glycaemic control was satisfactory among 50.6% (HbA1c less than 7) despite 84.5% of the study subjects being hyperglycaemic at admission (mean random blood sugar 20±9.0 mmol/L). Fifty-point seven of the subjects had long term complications of diabetes at admission with hypertension (53.8%) and peripheral neuropathy (38.3%) being the commonest. There were 13 deaths (10.8%) and 61.5% of the deaths were among patients admitted with infections. The average length of hospitalisation was 9.5±4 days.

The results show that the commonest causes of admission were uncontrolled diabetes and infections. The mortality rate was 10.8%.