Lifetime risk and years lost to type 1 and type 2 diabetes in Denmark, 1996-2016

Lifetime risk and lifetime lost to diabetes are measures of current diabetes burden in a population. We aimed at quantifying these measures in the Danish population.

We modeled incidence and mortality of type 1 diabetes (T1D) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) and non-diabetes mortality based on complete follow-up of the entire population of Denmark in 1996-2016. A multistate model with these transition rates was used to assess the lifetime risk of diabetes, as well as the difference in expected lifetime between persons with type 1 and T2D and persons without.

In 2016, the lifetime risk of T1D was 1.1% and that for T2D 24%, the latter a 50% increase from 1996. For 50-year-old persons, the lifetime lost was 6.6 years for T1D and 4.8 years for T2D. These figures have been declining over the study period.At 2016, the total foreseeable lives lost in Denmark among patients with T1D were 182 000 years, and those among patients with T2D were 766 000 years, corresponding to 6.6 and 3.0 years per person, respectively.

At the individual level, improvements in the disease burden for both T1D and T2D have occurred. At the population level, the increasing number of patients with T2D has contributed to a large increase in the total loss of lifetime.