Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Control Measures on Screening and Diagnoses of Type 2 Diabetes in British Columbia

Introduction: In British Columbia (BC), Canada, COVID-19 and associated control measures impacted routine care for patients with diabetes. Some of these measures may have impacted timely screening and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. We assessed the impact of control measures on screening and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in BC. Methods: We used data from the BC COVID-19 Cohort, which includes COVID-19 and healthcare administrative data on all residents of BC. We assessed and compared screening (≥40 yrs) and diagnosis (≥18 yrs) of diabetes among the adult population during the pandemic period (1 April 2020–31 December 2022), with 1 January 2016–31 March 2020 used as a historical reference period. We used interrupted time series with generalized additive models to evaluate the impact of policy measures on screening and diagnoses trends. Results: We observed an initial decline in the mean number of screenings and diagnoses. In the third post-policy phase (January 2022–December 2022), there was a 4.8% (−5.1, 15.4) increase in screenings while after an initial reduction in diabetes diagnoses, we observed a significant increase of 31.6% (17.8, 46.6) in the third post-policy phase. Further stratification by age and sex showed the entire increase in diagnoses trends was driven by younger females with a 56.4% (25.1, 92.9) and 58.7% (38.2, 81.3) increment in diagnoses in the 18–29 and 40–49 age groups, respectively. Conclusions: The initial reduced number of screenings and diagnoses followed by the significant upward trend in diabetes diagnoses in the later post-policy phase have important clinical and public health implications. Further research is needed to understand the post-pandemic increase in diabetes among females.