Global Diabetes Mortality Analysis: A Reproducible WHO Data-Driven Study of Trends, Regional Disparities, and Prevalence-Mortality Relationships (2000–2014)

This study’s principal contribution is a fully transparent, error-checked framework for analyzing global diabetes mortality by jointly harmonizing WHO mortality (GHE) and prevalence (GHO) data across 190 countries, a pairing rarely attempted in the existing literature. The analysis explicitly identifies and removes aggregate entity rows that silently inflate summary statistics in comparable WHO-based studies, corrects for the non-independence of repeated country-year observations through annual cross-sectional sensitivity checks, and applies both parametric (Pearson) and non-parametric (Spearman) correlation tests to confirm that raw prevalence is a statistically significant but practically negligible predictor of absolute mortality. Through an income-group stratified comparison, the study further shows that healthcare system capacity, rather than disease prevalence, plausibly drives the widening mortality gap between high-income countries and LMICs. Collectively, this offers a reproducible template for future multi-country WHO-based analyses rather than a new statistical method.