RNS: Racial disparities and blood sugar control, September 2007
TIME: 2:17
Additional Audio:
URL: http://www.med.umich.edu/prmc/radio/2007/hmdisparities
U-M Health News Now: Today’s top health issues and medical research
Older Blacks and Latinos still lag whites in controlling blood sugar, nationally representative U-M/VA study finds
But improvement may be possible by targeting factors such as medication use and emotional distress, for which the racial and ethnic gap is wide
Suggested lead: A new University of Michigan and VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System study is shedding new light as to the reasons why there are such strong racial and ethnic disparities in diabetes control. Here’s Andi Mcdonnell with more.
Despite decades of advances in diabetes care, African Americans and Latinos are still far less likely than whites to have their blood sugar under control, even with the help of medications, according to a new national study.
The study – performed by a team from the University of Michigan and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System – documents the persistence of strong racial and ethnic disparities in diabetes control. The results suggest that diabetes will continue to kill and disable black and Latino adults disproportionately for decades to come.
Dr. Michele Heisler (M.D., MPA), an assistant professor of Internal Medicine at the U-M Medical School and a research scientist at the VA Ann Arbor’s Center for Clinical Practice Management Research, explains…
“Good blood sugar control is crucial for avoiding many of the complications of diabetes. Blood pressure control is also important, lipid control but many of the complications such as kidney failure, blindness, are directly related to blood sugar levels so that’s a very important part of maintaining good control of your diabetes.”
According to study results, two factors account for a sizable portion of the racial and ethnic difference in glucose control: How well patients persist in taking their diabetes medicines regularly, and how they respond emotionally to having diabetes.
Heisler tells us…
“When we looked at everything all together – income, education – a number of the traditional ones [factors] that we think about and are harder to act on were not associated with glycemic control once you put in everything in the model; they were very highly associated with it when you just looked at them independently. So I think that this is encouraging in terms of developing interventions to try to improve diabetes outcomes by really focusing in on better supporting patients self-management of diabetes.”
Heisler says to improve diabetes outcomes, health care providers must do better at supporting all patients in managing their disease through treatment and lifestyle change.
The key, she says, is to tailor specific interventions to address the barriers to achieving good diabetes control that African American and Latino adults with diabetes disproportionately face.
Andi Mcdonnell, U-M Health System News. |
Additional
PRMC Info
