ORAHS2024
Abstract Submission

148. Screening Strategies for Type 2 Diabetes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Contributed abstract in session TA-4: Epidemiology and Prevention, stream Regular talks.

Tuesday, 9:00-10:30
Room: Room S3

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Dursen Deniz Poyraz
Technology and Operations Management, Rotterdam School of Management
2. Harwin de Vries
Rotterdam School of Management
3. Qingxia Kong
Rotterdam School of Management

Abstract

In low- and middle-income countries, Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) can more easily be overlooked due to limited resources and develop into more severe health conditions such as diabetic foot, retinopathy, kidney disease, stroke, and heart attack. Medical studies signal the importance of early detection and show that lifestyle changes and a healthy diet can help not only stop T2D from developing but also recover a prediabetic patient back to a healthy state.
To tackle this huge preventable disease burden, countries and organizations are putting efforts into early detection. One key strategy is to scale these efforts up through active screening campaigns. Though screening campaigns are effective at detecting cases, required resources are scarce, making it crucial to optimize policies that guide the deployment of such campaigns. Two decisions of such policies are i. the frequency at which to screen a given population, and ii. the criteria for including people in the screening. Institutions such as the American Diabetes Association and World Health Organization have guidelines with a fixed frequency and risk threshold for populations when there appear to be strong reasons to differentiate.
To address the issues on screening for T2D in a limited resource setting, we model the disease progression as a Markov chain. We use an optimization model that maximizes the total quality-of-life score under a budget constraint, and simulation to evaluate the performance of various simple policies.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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