Abstract
Despite great strides in pharmacotherapy for diabetes, there is increasing concern over the risk of hypoglycemia in diabetes patients receiving pharmacotherapy as they become older. This has prompted the Japan Diabetes Society (JDS) to initiate a survey on the current status of severe hypoglycemia in the clinical setting. In July 2015, after receiving approval from the JDS Scientific Survey/Research Ethics Committee, the JDS extended an invitation to executive educators, who represented a total of 631 healthcare facilities accredited by the JDS for diabetes education, to participate in the proposed survey. Among these educators, those who expressed their willingness to participate in the survey were sent an application form to obtain ethical approval from their hospitals. After receiving approval, they were asked to enter relevant clinical data (on an unlinked, anonymous basis) into a web-based registry. The current survey was fully funded by the JDS Scientific Survey/Research Committee. A case registry (clinical case database) was launched after collecting facility-specific information (healthcare facility database) from all of the participating facilities and after obtaining informed consent from all of the participating patients. The current survey, which defined severe hypoglycemia as "the presence of hypoglycemic symptoms requiring assistance from another person to treat and plasma venous glucose levels at the onset/diagnosis of disease or glucose levels that were clearly less than 60 mg/dL at presentation (capillary whole blood glucose, <50 mg/dL) ", was conducted between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015, During the study period, facility-specific information was collected from a total of 193 healthcare facilities with a total of 798 case reports collected from 113 facilities. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)
