Online diabetes registry yet to take off eight months after launch

Dubai: The UAE on-line diabetes registry, set up to determined the disease's prevalence, is yet to register its first case, eight months after it was launched.

The web-based Diabetes Care Continuum, established by the National Committee on Diabetes and Emirates Diabetes Society with support from GlaxoSmithKline, was launched in November last year.

The registry is supposed to unify all the health authorities' and private sector data on diabetes patients in the country.

The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) has listed the UAE as the country with second-highest prevalence rate in the world at 19.5 per cent.

Dr Abdul Razak Al Madani, president of the Emirates Diabetes Society, told the press on the sidelines of a diabetes conference that they have not figured out a way to ensure there is no overlap of patients registered on the site.

"The website is functioning [but] the window where the doctor or clinic can put the registration, the name and the details and everything - that is still not within the website," he said.

"We have some identification problems: how we can take the patient, how we'll have the number that will not be repeated. There are different suggestions: shall we take the national ID number, shall we take their mobile number [or] their residency number," he added.

Data on the registry is supposed to be anonymous and confidential.

None of the patients are supposed to be identified by name; instead, they are to be assigned numbers. However, establishing parameters to separate one patient from another was proving difficult.

Dr Al Madani said the registry has to be up and working by the end of the year to find out the diabetes outlook in the UAE.

"The current data is 10 years back. In 10 years, we don't know whether we went in the right direction and reduced it, or we went in the wrong direction and increased it. And the other thing is the category of the people who were studied," he said.

Despite international projections, he expected diabetes to have gone down in the last decade.

"Actually, I expect [diabetes prevalence now] to be less than 19.5 per cent," he said.

If true, the expectation would be flying against common projections, which projects an 81 per cent increase of the metabolic disorder in the Middle East by 2025.