[About age of diabetes]

Diabetes in the elderly is increasing significantly in medical practice. This retrospective study is about 261 patients over 60 years of age at the diagnosis of diabetes. The main conditions of diagnosis were fortuitous discovery [50, 9%], cardinal signs [23, 3%] and complication in 19, 2% of the cases. Systematic screening was rare [6, 9%]. A microangiopathy was seen in 27, 6% of the cases corresponding to an undetected diabetes and vascular lesions were found in 15, 7% of the cases. The majority of patients had type 2 diabetes [95, 8%] and 8,896 of them were already requiring insulin therapy. 44.4% of the patients were also treated for other conditions and 19.9% had a handicap. Our results suggest the need for an early screening and for a complete clinical and etiologic evaluation when diabetes is found in the elderly