These researchers used General Electoral Districts (GEDs) to identify and map geographical variations in diagnosed diabetes in the greater Auckland Region for the year 2011. Encrypted National Health Identifiers and record linkage of routine health datasets revealed an estimated 63,014 people with diagnosed type 1 or type 2 diabetes in Auckland in 2011, representing 8.5% of the adult population aged ≥30 years. The geographical unit of a person’s residence (meshblock) was used to determine the GED of residence. Diabetes prevalence varied significantly by age, gender, ethnicity and GED; in unadjusted analyses, the prevalence was more than 5-fold higher in Mangere (17.3%) as compared with in the North Shore (3.2%). Such variations remained after binary logistic regression adjusting for sociodemographic variables. Compared to New Zealand Europeans, Indian people had the highest odds of having diabetes at 3.85, while the odds of people living in the most deprived areas having diabetes was nearly twice that of those living in least deprived areas (OR 1.93; 95% CI, 1.87 to 1.99). Geographic variations in diabetes remained after adjusting for sociodemographic circumstances: people living in GEDs in south-west Auckland were at least 60% more likely than people living in the North Shore GED to have diabetes.
