Global mortality attributable to diabetes: time for a realistic estimate

Measures of the public health importance of a health condition include the number of people affected and the number of deaths that are attributable to it. Globally, the number of people with diabetes is estimated to be just short of 200 million. However, diabetes is rarely perceived as a major contributor to mortality, largely because routine mortality statistics are based on death certificates where diabetes is often omitted as the underlying cause of death. For parts of the world without medical death certification, models have been used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to estimate the mortality for some conditions, but not until recently for diabetes. Gojka Roglic and Nigel Unwin report.