Diabetes: Excess deaths well down, study indicates.

The extra risk of dying for people with diabetes has fallen sharply since the mid 1990s, research suggests.

It found in 2009 people with diabetes were 1.5 times more likely to die than those without it in a given period - down from two times as likely in 1996. The study, in journal Diabetologia covering millions of Canadian and UK patients, concludes this may be due to better treatment and earlier diagnosis. Diabetes UK says thousands of patients are still dying prematurely every year. Since the mid 1990s the number of people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK has climbed from fewer than one and a half million to three million.

The disease and its often-fatal complications - including heart disease, stroke and kidney failure - pose a huge and growing challenge for the NHS.

But this study points to progress in cutting deaths. In the mid 1990s, it suggests, people with diabetes were almost twice as likely to die in a given period as those without the disease. By 2009, it indicates, that figure had fallen to about one and a half times the risk.

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