Objective: To analyse the extent of knowledge about diabetic condition in patients who are suffering from Type-2 DM. METHODOLOGY: A prospective-observational study on diabetic knowledge was done in Inpatient and outpatient Department of a tertiary care hospital in Bangalore for a period of 6 months. The patients (inpatients and outpatients) suffering from Type-2 DM of either sex who were aged 35 years or above and satisfied the study criteria such as patient who are diagnosed with type2 DM for more than 1 year, who are on either parentral or oral hypoglycemic were enrolled prospectively for six months. The patient, clinical, medication and socioeconomic data were collected. Different levels of education considered were: Post-gradates, graduates, schooling and illiterate. Michigan Diabetes Knowledge Testing scale was given to the enrolled patients to self-administer the scale in patient waiting area. Each answer was dichotomously scored. Accordingly, each correct answer is awarded a score of one while every incorrect or unsure answer was awarded a score of zero. The total score was categorized as: Score > 17= Better Knowledge, Score 11-17 = Average Knowledge and Score < 11 = Poor knowledge. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Totally 400 patients (Males 61%, Females 39%, mean age+/-0.6176) suffering from Type-2 DM were enrolled. Majority of the patients were graduates (198) 50% followed by patients with school level education (116), 29% , illiterate patients were (69), 17% and least number of patients were post graduates (17) 4%. Among the study patients, majority (205) 51.25% had poor knowledge followed by 182 patients (45.5%) who had average knowledge. However, 3.25% patients had showed better knowledge. This indicates that majority of the patients were with poor knowledge which resembles previous study conducted in South Africa that shows 66.9% of the population studied passed the diabetes knowledge test with more than 50% score 2. CONCLUSION: Majority of the patients suffering from Type-2 DM have poor knowledge about their disease irrespective of their education level. This urges the need for educating diabetic patients.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.