‘Early intervention prevents diabetes’

Study shows messages on diet and exercise result in a striking 75% reduction in the onset of diabetes

September 14, 2014 02:21 am | Updated October 18, 2016 02:06 pm IST - CHENNAI:

If you needed more proof of the effect of early intervention, however modest, on the prevention of diabetes, here it is.

A city-based study shows that early intervention (including with text messages), and providing messages on diet and exercise, result in a striking 75 per cent reduction in the onset of diabetes.

In a recent volume of Diabetes Care, a paper published by Nanditha Arun and a team from Dr. A. Ramachandran’s Diabetes Hospital establishes that with early initiation of lifestyle intervention among a group of persons in the pre-diabetic stage, it became possible to push back or postpone diabetes. Dr. Nanditha says the study was a follow-up to an earlier one on primary prevention, conducted among over 8,000 participants in an industrial setting in Chennai.

They were randomised into two groups, and both groups were given information on moderate diet and exercise modifications, while one group was also sent personalised SMS on the same.

“At six months, some of those in the pre-diabetic stage, in both groups, reversed to normal glucose tolerance. At the end of two years, there was a 36 per cent reduction in the incidence of diabetes in the group that received SMS, compared to those who had not,” says Dr. Nanditha.

In this study, which followed up on those 436 persons who had reversed to normal sugar levels at six months, 130 (about 30 per cent) had reversed back to normal, and 306 remained pre-diabetic.

At the end of two years, it was found that in the first group, only seven went on to develop diabetes, as compared to 71 persons who remained pre-diabetic at six months.

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