Diabetes is a growing public health issue in Canada, and this concern is now extending to children and adolescents. Our goal was to conduct research projects aimed at pediatric diabetes surveillance in Alberta, Canada. To identify diabetes cases, we applied the National Diabetes Surveillance System (NDSS) case definition to retrospectively-collected, population-based datasets. Our first objective was to assess the regional variation in diabetes incidence and prevalence across urban and rural

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... as between 1995-2007. After observing an unexpected decrease in diabetes incidence between 2002-2006, our second objective was to investigate a possible association with changes in physician remuneration through Alternate Relationship Plans (ARPs) that may have affected the number of diabetes cases identified from administrative data. Our results indicated that there was no regional variation in diabetes incidence and prevalence over the period of study and that there was no association between ARPs and the observed decline in incident diabetes cases.