Table 2.

Characteristics of patients treated with oral blood glucose-lowering drugs by treatment group

Descriptive characteristics	Patients treated with oral blood glucose lowering drugs	Monotherapy	Fixed combination	Dual therapy
No of patients with diabetes*	169,375	91,816	31,674	19,573
		54.2%	18.7%	11.6%
Prevalence	4.2%	2.3%	0.8%	0.5%
Female	3.9%	2.2%	0.7%	0.4%
Male	4.5%	2.4%	0.8%	0.5%
Average age	68.9	68.3	71.9	67.5
% of females	49.1%	49.8%	49.4%	47.0%
Mean no of prescribed packs/year	72.5	66.6	71.2	86.8
For oral blood glucose lowering drugs	17.7	13.1	16.4	31.4
For insulin	1.0	1.0	1.0	1.0
For other drugs	54.8	53.6	54.7	55.5
DDD 1000 persons/day	175.6	85.2	32.2	26.1
For oral blood glucose lowering drugs	40.8	14.6	7.3	9.6
For insulin	3.9	2.2	0.7	0.5
For other drugs	134.8	70.6	24.9	16.4
Mean no of hospitalization/year (per 1000 patients)	328‰	328‰	314‰	298‰
Mean no of specialist examinations/year	35.1	34.0	30.1	38.6

Notes:

^*The 169,375 patients include both the sum of patients in monotherapy, fixed combination and dual thearpy (∑ = 143,063), and patients in mixed therapy: (N = 26,312).

Abbreviation: DDD, defined daily dose.