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September 24, 2007Older Blacks and Latinos Still Lag Whites in Controlling Diabetes |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Despite decades of advances in diabetes care, African Americans and Latinos are still far less likely than whites to have their blood sugar under control, even with the help of medications, a new nationally representative study finds. The study documents the persistence of strong racial and ethnic disparities in diabetes control, which have been observed for decades and contribute to the much greater impact of diabetes on those two ethnic groups. The results suggest that diabetes will continue to kill and disable black and Latino adults disproportionately for decades to come. But the study delves deeper into the reasons behind this difference in blood sugar levels, using complex statistical analysis to find factors that do -- and don't -- play a role. For instance, diabetes control was worse among black and Latinos under age 65. Most notably, two factors were found to account for a sizable portion of the racial and ethnic difference in glucose control: how well patients persist in taking their diabetes medicines regularly, and how they respond emotionally to having diabetes. The study is based on very recent data from the Health and Retirement Study, a decades-long national effort to assess the health of adults over age 50 through regular completion of intensive questionnaires and health examinations. People without diabetes typically have an A1C under 6 points. But when the researchers analyzed data from study participants who were taking medications to control their blood sugar, the difference between the mean A1C for whites and the means for the other ethnic groups was large.
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