The relationship between demographic and anthropometric characteristics and diabetic complications and number of hospitalizations in hospitalized diabetic patients

Introduction
Diabetes mellitus is the most common endocrine disease in the world. A total of 371 million people with diabetes lived in the world in 2012, 4.8 million people lost their lives due to diabetes, and 612–1099 billion dollars are spent on diabetic patients each year. The aim of our study was to investigate the relationship between the number of hospitalized patients, the demographic and anthropometric characteristics, and diabetic complications.

Material and methods
Five hundred patients hospitalized with DM diagnosis were included in this study. Patients were divided into three groups according to the number of hospitalizations. The relationship between the number of hospitalizations and risk factors was examined. Parameters were analyzed using linear regression, 2 test and independent t-test.

Results
When the number of hospitalizations was classified, the groups were formed as the patients who were hospitalized once, twice, or three times or more, respectively: 351 (70.2%), 86 (17.2%), and 63 (12.6%). In our study, it was found that patients with three times or more hospitalizations had worse glycemic control, duration of diabetes, and rate of taking insulin treatment, which was found to be significantly high (p < 0.05), the number of non-smokers was significantly low (p < 0.05), the quitting rate was significantly high (p < 0.05), nephropathy, retinopathy, and cerebrovascular events and cardiovascular diseases were significantly high (p < 0.05) compared to one and two hospitalizations.

Conclusions
In our study, it was found that glycemic control and diabetic complications were important determinants in the control of diabetes-related hospitalizations; and well-controlled diabetes was found to reduce the number of hospital admissions of patients with diabetes in Turkey. There are no financial data; however, in this context, it can be envisaged that it will have a lowering effect on the cost per patient.