Strengths and limitations of healthcare databases in the evaluation of hypoglycaemia

In this issue of DOM, Zaccardi et al. present an analysis of hypoglycaemia-related hospitalizations in the Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) administrative database of the English National Health Service. [1] Notable strengths of the work include a large sample size involving more than 100 000 cases of hypoglycaemia, and nationwide capture spanning a duration of ten years. Key conclusions include the possibility of a U-shaped relationship between risk of hypoglycaemia and age, as well as possible associations between social deprivation and ethnicity with greater risk of hypoglycaemia.