A new study which found that diabetes risk increases after glucocorticoids has made headlines, including a feature on the BBC news site.
Researchers in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine’s Diabetes Trial Unit at the University of Oxford had been investigating how commonly patients receiving glucocorticoids were developing new-onset diabetes. This work was supported by an ABCD Research Grant, and involved 451,606 adults (median age 52 years, 55% female, 69% White) who were admitted to the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust between 1 January 2013 and 1 October 2023. All were free from diabetes at the start of the study and none were taking systemic glucocorticoids.
17,258 (3.8%) of the patients were treated with systemic glucocorticoids (some names include prednisolone, hydrocortisone, dexamethasone) while in hospital, most commonly for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and for infections.
316 of these 17,258 patients (1.8%) developed diabetes while in hospital. This compares with 3,430 of the 434,348 patients (0.8%) who didn’t receive systemic glucocorticoids. Patients were typically admitted for less than a week.
Further analysis showed that, when age and sex were factored in, patients receiving systemic glucocorticoids were more than twice as likely (2.6 times) to develop diabetes as those not receiving the treatment.
The study abstract was presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) this week in Madrid.
Study leader Dr Rajna Golubic said:
"These latest results give clinical staff a better estimate of how likely new diabetes is to occur and could prompt doctors to plan clinical care more effectively to detect and manage new diabetes."
Dr. Rajna Golubic was awarded an ABCD Research Grant in 2022 for their project 'Using routine clinical data from hospital records to improve detecting and managing glucocorticoid-induced diabetes'. Learn more about our Research Grants and other funding schemes.
