Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

Even though it meant getting up very early on my day off from work, I was thrilled to go to Washington, D.C. last week for a diabetes town hall, co-sponsored by the Office of Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office of Minority Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The event, as you can imagine, was designed to facilitate discussion on ways to better promote diabetes prevention and care among the non-white populations in my country. I thought that was a terrific idea. After all, the prevalence of diabetes is much higher in non-whites than in whites here in the USA, yet many of the people affected are in vastly underserved communities, either due to socioeconomic reasons, location, or because their first language is not English. I get it, I thought. This is good.

But it turns out that there is still a lot I don’t know.

For instance… did you know that the prevalence of diabetes in the United States is highest among Native Americans and Alaskan Natives? At 15.1%, their risk of diabetes is over twice that of someone who looks like me. It turns out that 12.7% of African-Americans live with diabetes, and 12.1% of Hispanics do too. Only 7.4% of non-Hispanic Whites live with diabetes here.

But that’s not all. Eight percent of Asian Americans live with diabetes, but they are far more prone to being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at a lower body mass index (BMI) than other ethnicities. Those advocating for greater awareness among this population are touting an initiative called Screen at 23 to test all Asian Americans for diabetes if their BMI is at 23 or over.

As our presenters that day shared their data, it was clear that while I feel I’m enlightened, I really don’t know as much as I thought I knew. For instance, while there is data surrounding ethnic backgrounds of clinical trial participants, when we see a number that says “Asian”, we don’t know if the Asians in the study were of Japanese descent or Indian descent. When we see “non-Hispanic Black”, we don’t know if these are people of Senegalese or Jamaican descent. Those specifics could mean real differences in understanding the underlying data from a clinical trial.

How about this? Did you know that FDA has sponsored a Minorities in Clinical Trials campaign? The idea is to remove barriers to clinical trial participation for minorities, who, as a friend mentioned, may have transportation, job, family, or other special constraints that make clinical trial participation more difficult than it is for a lot of the majority population.

Did you know that people with prediabetes enrolled in a Lifestyle Change Program for a year under the National Diabetes Prevention Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a mouthful… take a moment and breathe) showed, on average, a 5% to 7% loss in body weight, and had a 58% reduction in their risk of being diagnosed with diabetes? How do we promote the NDPP and its successes among states and tribal areas with vulnerable populations?

I learned a lot in this short, half day event. Here are a couple of nuggets that I heard more than once:

– We need additional data to understand segments of the various populations at risk for, and with higher prevalence of, diabetes. Subgroups of subgroups, if you will.

– Material and coaching rolled out to non-white populations need to be presented in a linguistically and culturally appropriate manner. One size does not fit all, and there is evidence that tailoring a message to its audience has a positive effect.

One of the words I heard mentioned a lot that day was disparities. The more we can reduce the disparities that exist in diagnosis; access to care, food, drugs, and devices; participation in clinical trials; and information that sends clear messages in terms that underserved populations can understand, the more inclusive we will be as a diabetes community, and the healthier all of us will be.