Diabetes and Obesity in Bulgaria. Study of a Large Number of Outpatient Records from 2018

This paper considers the association between diabetes and obesity by examining body mass index (BMI) values and ICD-10 codes for obesity illnesses. The BMI values are extracted from 6,887,876 anonymized outpatient records describing all the visits of diabetics to general practitioners and specialists in ambulatory care from the latest Bulgarian nationally representative data. The number of adults in this sample having BMI ≥ 25 is 253,841 i.e. 84.121% of the adult diabetics with BMI records are overweight or obese. The objective of the study is to reveal how the BMI recorded values in outpatient records relate diabetics with overweight or obesity illness. In the existing literature sources there is scant empirical data of this subject where the conclusions are founded on a nationally representative sample. A secondary objective is to obtain the distribution of BMI values of adults with respect to their age and gender. The initial computer experiments prove that there is no immediate and unconditional relation between BMI and the obesity illnesses. These results underpin the role of BMI as a risk factor that should be observed regularly as an important part of proactive public health policies.