This post was authored by Robert E. Ratner, MD, chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

November is American Diabetes Month – an opportunity to raise awareness of what has become a health epidemic of global proportions. In America alone, diabetes kills more people each year than AIDS and breast cancer combined, a disproportionate number of them belonging to minority and ethnic populations. Nearly 30 million children and adults in this country live with this often debilitating, and always costly and demanding disease. Another 86 million adults have prediabetes, in which blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not yet high enough for a diabetes diagnosis. And even though we know how to prevent a vast number of these cases, prevalence continues to grow and may well triple by 2050 if we fail to reverse current trends.

The strong association between diabetes and cardiovascular health – cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of people with diabetes – provides a compelling reason for endocrinologists, cardiologists and other health care providers to work together to thwart this growing epidemic and provide better preventive treatment and care that can improve the lives of billions.

That’s why the American Diabetes Association strongly supports the creation of the Diabetes Collaborative Registry – the first global, cross-specialty, clinical diabetes registry designed to track and improve the quality of diabetes and cardiometabolic care across the primary care and specialty care continuum.

This interdisciplinary collaboration between the ACC, the American Diabetes Association, AstraZeneca, the American College of Physicians and the Joslin Diabetes Center will allow us to integrate vast amounts of clinical data from electronic health records across a wide spectrum of participating providers to track diabetes management and outcomes in the real world. Ultimately, this registry will provide researchers, practitioners, policy makers and consumers a vehicle for ensuring the best quality of care that is informed by the latest research, science and guidelines.

Stopping diabetes – and its related cardiovascular complications – won’t be easy. But the Diabetes Collaborative Registry moves us one step closer to obtaining the resources we need to do so.

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