Assessment of Diabetic Knowledge in Patients with Type-II Diabets Mellitus

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 out-patients) 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 socio-economic 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% score².

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.