The best real-world data setting for diabetes research – How much data is required?

The Swedish setting provides an extremely rich data set with very high quality for diabetes research. The foundation is the national diabetes registry (NDR) that covers 92,7% of all patients in the country diagnosed with Diabetes.  NDR includes a comprehensive list of variables specific to diabetes and is probably the richest data set in the world for diabetes research, without the linkage to all the other datasets.

The data from NDR can seamlessly be linked to other national government datasets as well as other disease specific quality registries (figure 1).

In an internal project, we evaluated several dimensions of the characteristics of the research originated from NDR. Below is a summary of how frequently other datasets were linked to NDR to answer the research question at hand. Out of the 140+ publications included in the analysis there is a broad utilization of additional datasets to enrich the data. The combination of NDR with all these other registries probably creates the best RWE setting to study longitudinal questions relating to diabetes.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested to carry out real-world-evidence studies in Diabetes or other disease areas.