A new study is showing that doctors and diabetic patients don't agree on what part of the patient's health conditions is most important. Patients seem to focus on problems like chronic pain and depression, while doctors focus on conditions like hypertension. The middle ground involves treatment.
Researchers at the Ann Arbor VA Center for Clinical Management Research and the University of Michigan's Medical School surveyed 92 primary care doctors and 1,200 patients who had diabetes and hypertension. Over a quarter of the doctor-patient pairs revealed disagreements about what their top 3 health concerns were.
Doctors appeared to be focused on more long term issues such as blood pressure, while patients were concerned about current issues like back pain. Hypertension was ranked by 38 percent of doctors as the most important condition, but only 18 percent of patients ranked the same. The study is questioning whether diabetics are having trouble managing their diabetes because of doctor-patient disagreements.
“Both sets of priorities are valid. We know from previous studies however that conditions like pain can interfere with a person’s ability to manage his or her diabetes. So putting these types of symptomatic problems on the back-burner might lead to worse outcomes in diabetes and other chronic diseases.” Stated by lead author Donna M. Zulman, M.D., a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar in the Department of Internal Medicine at the U-M Medical School and researcher at the VA Healthcare System in Ann Arbor.
New treatments and diabetes diagnosis types are being released daily. The FDA has already approved a longer lasting insulin shot, called Victoza, and research was release this week that diagnosis can be less invasive by no longer forcing patients to fast or undergo hours of blood glucose testing.
Diabetes patients, on average, suffer from at least three chronic health problems, outside of diabetes. Their doctors therefore, have to diagnosis and treat more than just diabetes, which causes multiple visits, medications and disagreements. The study is further encouraging physicians to focus on the their patients' needs, especially when 18 million Americans suffer from diabetes and 5.7 million are living undiagnosed. The numbers have almost tripled since 1980.
The causes of diabetes range from age, obesity, inactivity to medical reactions, pregnancy and damage to the pancreas. The correlation between an increase in obesity and an increase in diabetes is significant and are among the two leading health problems in the U.S.
Written by Amy Munday
Huliq.com
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