Managing Diabetes in the Elderly Patient

Older people with diabetes represent a heterogeneous group of people with recent onset and a longer-term history of diabetes. Current guidelines do not distinguish between sub-groups, partly because of limited availability of evidence from randomised controlled trials. In the Scottish Diabetes Survey 2014, there were 27 new cases of type 1 diabetes in people over the age of 69 years of age and this was 3.1% of the 883 new cases in total. This was in contrast to 4,217 cases of type 2 diabetes in people aged over 69 years (26% of the 16,379 new cases in total). There was