The influence of diabetic family history on the development of neuropathy in type 2 diabetes patients: A survival analysis

Abstract

Introduction: Neuropathy is a common and dangerous complication of diabetes mellitus with the highest mortality rate, as well as high costs for diabetic patients. This study aimed to identify the factors affecting the event time of neuropathy incidence in diabetic patients using cure models. Material and Methods: For data collection, all the patients whose diabetic screening tests conducted by the Fereidounshahr Health Centers and were negative in 2006, but were diagnosed with diabetes mellitus in 2007 through rescreening and were at least 30 years of age were enrolled in the study, and their neuropathy status was monitored for at least ten years. Mixture and non-mixture cure models were used for data analysis, and the survival-specific receiver operating characteristic curve was also used to compare the efficiency of the models. Results: Of the 371 diabetic patients, 257 were females (69.3), and 178 (47.97) had a family history of diabetes mellitus. Having fitted the exponential mixture and non-mixture cure models, as well as Weibull, log-normal, and log-logistic ones, we found the log-logistic model as being the most efficient. In the final fitted log-logistic mixture cure model, the variables such as a family history of diabetes mellitus, fasting blood sugar, ethnicity, and gender were significantly associated with the time of neuropathy incidence. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that female patients from Fars who had a positive family history of diabetes mellitus needed to more precisely control their fasting blood sugar in order to delay the incidence of neuropathy. © 2020 The Authors. Romanian Journal of Diabetes, Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases published by Sanatatea Press Group on behalf of the Romanian Society of Diabetes Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0).