Overview
- The PLOS Medicine analysis of 28,720 people newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes used linked UK primary and secondary records and followed participants for a median 6.8 years to map the order and timing of complications.
- Women were more likely to be recorded with a mental health diagnosis after diabetes with 8.1% affected compared with 5.3% of men, and the excess was largest in younger women.
- Men were more likely to follow trajectories that included cardiovascular disease or end‑stage renal disease, at 8.4% versus 5.3% for women, while hypertension was the single most common complication for both sexes (about 20–21%).
- The study found that people who developed a mental health condition after diabetes experienced earlier mortality and that men in that trajectory died on average nine years younger than women with the same sequence of conditions.
- Authors and commentators caution the results are observational, note that women had far higher primary care use which could raise diagnosis rates, and call for routine mental‑health screening, earlier CVD/kidney surveillance, and further research to test causation and reduce detection bias.