If you live in Williamsburg or Harlem you are 132% more likely to develop serious complications from diabetes than if you live in Riverdale, according to a report released yesterday by the comptroller’s office.

The study shows a disproportionate amount of suffering among diabetic patients from complications associated with the disease in some parts of the city.

Diabetes affects an estimated 675,000 New Yorkers. Some 450,000 are known to have the disease and medical officials say there are probably another 225,000 New Yorkers who have the disease but don’t know. Typically, there is a higher concentration of diabetes in poor and minority neighborhoods, and because there is a higher incidence of the disease more people in those demographic areas tend to die from or are hospitalized due to diabetes complications.

This report identifies for the first time the New York neighborhoods where diabetics become the sickest from the disease. The report found a number of instances where neighborhoods rank very differently on the measures of diabetes prevalence and diabetes complications. Northern Staten Island’s Stapleton neighborhood, for example, has 29% fewer diabetics than the average New York City neighborhood but 53% more complications.

“Many New Yorkers are unnecessarily dying from the disease,” the city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., said.

The nine neighborhoods with the most serious problems include: Stapleton/St. George, Willowbrook, and Port Richmond on Staten Island; East Harlem and Morningside Heights in Manhattan; Williamsburg/Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant/Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and Jamaica and Flushing in Queens.

As researchers expected, diabetes in East Harlem and East New York is three to eight times more prevalent than in places like Flushing, the Upper West Side, and Greenwich Village, the report found. What they hadn’t anticipated was that diabetes complications – such as stroke and limb amputations – didn’t track the same way. They was more closely linked to medical care than to economics.

“Of all the factors measured in this study, the one that has the biggest effect on whether diabetics develop complications is the quality of primary and preventative care,” the report said.

Mr. Thompson called on the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to identify the health facilities and providers serving those who live in the nine high-risk neighborhoods and evaluate their diabetes management practices.