For the last 10 years, many studies on diabetes wellness have shown that intensive weight loss intervention programmes led by medical health professionals have reduced incidences of type 2 diabetes. However, if you have, or are trying to prevent, diabetes, a new study has shown that your wellbeing isn’t as dependent on this face-time as you might think.
According to the clinical study from the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, there is a better, practical way for your primary care physician to help you when you are at high risk for developing diabetes, even though the current strategy of intensive one-on-one intervention has led to a 58% decrease in type-2 diabetes incidences, surpassing the benefit of drug treatment.
The study was led by Jun Ma, MD, PhD, an associate investigator at the research institute and an affiliate member of the Stanford Prevention Research Centre, and used a similar strategy but also used online resources and a take-home DVD. This means you could access everything you need without troubling your doctor, and so doctors could have a lower patient load, which would allow them to provide better overall care.
Senior investigator on the study and, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Centre Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, says ‘The big issue in diabetes prevention is how to take what clearly worked for DPP — which was very intensive and one-on-one focused — and get it to the point where it could be established as a programme in large group practices’. The team recruited pre-diabetic patients for the three-months, and allocated them into one of three groups: a coach-led group intervention, a self-directed DVD intervention or usual care. In the first two groups, patients were also taught the mental and behavioural strategies necessary to make the changes stick. They were then regularly encouraged to keep going for the following year, via emails and health goal reminders.
They found that men responded with equal success to both the coach-led and self-directed interventions, whilst women responded better to the coach-led approach. There was an average drop in BMI of 2.2 for the coach-led group, 1.6 for the self-directed group and 0.9 for the group that received usual care. In terms of weight loss, the first group lost 13.9 pounds on average, the second lost 9.9 pounds and the third group lost 5.3.
Stafford commented that the differences between genders highlight the need for options when it comes to lifestyle interventions. ‘It suggests that a one-size-fits-all programme isn’t necessarily what we need. We need some way to offer people different styles of intervention’.
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