Prevention programs such as the lifestyle intervention that is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Diabetes Prevention Program are largely beneficial to patients, according to a recent synthesis of literature about prevention initiatives from the New York State Health Foundation.
The synthesis includes a comprehensive, systematic review of medical, diabetes and public health literature for evaluation studies of prevention initiatives focused on reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes, published from 2002 to 2013. It found that lifestyle interventions, such as the CDC’s program, can be effective in nonclinical, community-based settings and that lifestyle interventions were more successful than pharmacological interventions at reducing the risk of diabetes.
The findings bolster the need for the new multi-year partnership between the AMA and the CDC: Prevent Diabetes STAT: Screen, Test, Act – Today™. The partnership will help physicians tap diabetes prevention programs in their communities or online.
The literature synthesis found that other modifications to diabetes prevention programs, such as virtual interventions, have “promising but limited evidence.”
“If successful, these modifications could both reduce the cost of the interventions and increase participation,” the synthesis said.
The AMA-CDC partnership includes a new toolkit for physicians to learn the best methods of screening, testing and referring high-risk patients to diabetes prevention programs in their communities, virtually or online, helping to prevent patients from progressing to diabetes.
In 2012, the CDC launched the National Diabetes Prevention Program based on research led by the National Institutes of Health, which showed that individuals at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes who participated in structured lifestyle-change programs saw a significant reduction in the incidence of the disease.
In the average primary care practice, it’s likely that one-third of patients over age 18, and half over age 65, have prediabetes. In response to this fact, and as part of its Improving Health Outcomes initiative, the AMA spent the past year working with the YMCA of the USA and 11 physician practice pilot sites in four states to increase physician screening for prediabetes and referral of patients with prediabetes to diabetes prevention programs offered by local YMCAs—which use the CDC’s program.
Read about how to identify patients with undetected prediabetes and learn more about diabetes prevention programs at AMA Wire®.
