OBJECTIVES: Diabetes represents a burden to the health care system due to its increasing rates of incidence, morbidity and mortality. Epidemiological data is crucial for policy and decision making to clarify gaps in the current health program and to develop new ones. We decided to review the status of the population registered at Hiperdia program in order to better understand the real situation of these diseases. METHODS: HIPERDIA is a program for monitoring hypertensive/ diabetic outpatients under the public healthcare system care. Based on that database, we searched the general profile of this population from 2002 until 2010 focusing on type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and T2DM plus hypertension, and also geographical distribution, gender, age and overweight/ obesity prevalence were raised. RESULTS: From 2002 to 2010, a total of 2,199,972 people with T2DM and T2DM plus Hypertension were registered in the database, with 12.5 % presenting T2DM only and 87.5 % with both conditions, which represents about 1.5% of the total population under the public healthcare system. For patients with T2DM only we found 114,836 men and 159,581 women (41.8% and 58.2%) and for patients with both conditions we found 619,005 men and 1,306,550 women (32.1% and 67.9%).   Regarding age, the majority of the patients are in between 50 - 70 years-old. Almost 50% of the patients are distributed within 5 states SP, MG, BA, PR and RJ. Overweight or obesity was present in 48% of this population.   CONCLUSIONS: In accordance with epidemiological data, most of the diabetic patients in this database are middle-age, women and almost half of them are obese or overweight. Added to that, our estimates about diabetes prevalence were different from the number reported by the Brazilian MoH at 2008 (9.7%).