Complications and Comorbidities in Individuals >80 Years with Diabetes: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Objectives: Diabetes mellitus is increasingly prevalent among adults aged over 80 years; however, this population remains substantially underrepresented in clinical research on diabetes complications. This scoping review synthesises current evidence on diabetes-related complications and comorbidities in this older age group (>80 years), reported prevalence, and key evidence gaps. Methods: A systematic search of MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science was conducted for studies published between 1992 and 2024 reporting diabetes-related complications in individuals aged ≥80 years. Two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts, and full texts. Data were extracted and summarised using narrative synthesis, and descriptive statistics (SPSS v29) were conducted. Results: Fifty-one studies were included, comprising 17,630,083 individuals aged ≥80 years. Macrovascular complications were most frequently reported, followed by microvascular and peripheral outcomes. Hypertension was the most reported comorbidity. Macrovascular outcomes were assessed in over 17 million individuals, while microvascular complications were studied in fewer than 400,000. Only five studies focused exclusively on adults aged ≥80 years. Reporting was also limited by retrospective designs, heterogeneity in definitions, and frequent omission of key variables, including diabetes duration, HbA1c, frailty, and cognitive status. Conclusions: There is a critical mismatch between research focus and the complications most relevant to function and quality of life in older populations with diabetes. Easily measurable yet clinically impactful outcomes, such as retinopathy, neuropathy, nephropathy, and foot disease, remain under-investigated in this cohort. Standardised, age-stratified reporting that incorporates functional and geriatric domains is needed to inform person-centred care in this expanding population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".