WEDNESDAY, Oct. 28, 2020 — The incidence of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) was 61.6 cases per 10,000 admissions in 2017 and is higher in men than women, according to a research letter published online Oct. 13 in Diabetes Care.
Kamleshun Ramphul, M.D., from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and Jyotsnav Joynauth, from the Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, used data from the 2017 National Inpatient Sample to examine the impact of DKA in the United States.
The researchers identified 220,340 patients with a primary diagnosis of DKA (61.6 cases per 10,000 admissions). The incidence was higher in men than women (71.2 versus 54.1 per 10,000 admissions). Most DKA patients were covered by Medicaid (36.0 percent). More than half (53.3 percent) of all DKA patients were aged 18 to 44 years; however, patients aged 1 to 17 years had a higher incidence per 10,000 admissions. In 2017, the total charges among DKA patients were $6,757,748,178 (mean, $30,836.19). Length of stay was a mean of 3.22 days. Overall, 835 deaths occurred among DKA patients (mortality rate, 0.38 percent). The overall mortality rate was higher among men than women admitted with DKA (40.5 versus 35.3 deaths, respectively, per 10,000 cases of DKA). Mortality rates increased with increasing age, with 492.8 deaths estimated per 10,000 DKA cases among patients ≥85 years of age.
“We can, therefore, confirm that DKA is a growing concern with an equally heavy financial burden on the health care system,” the authors write.
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