Feedback from health care teams improves health outcomes
by Adam Burrack, PhD
A core tenet of our mission at YOUglycemia is to improve diabetes management through exercise and improved understanding of the biology of how diabetes ‘works’. A corollary of this mission statement is that interaction by our clients – actual dialogue – with experts in their fields will be beneficial. In other words, knowledge is power. We believe that if people with diabetes – our readers – understand the biology of how their disease works, they will choose health-promoting behaviors including moderate amounts of exercise, careful maintenance of blood sugar levels, and a balanced diet.
A recent study in Diabetes Care takes this idea to its logical conclusion. Researchers in Japan randomized participants in a clinical study to receive encouraging text messages to encourage physical activity, or not. In essence, these researchers removed the human component of the educational process, and basically reminded study participants to exercise. An important difference between this study and our focus is that this study was conducted with type 2 diabetic subjects. Keep this in mind when evaluating their results.
In the treatment group, a learning algorithm was applied to gradually increase duration or intensity of the exercise that study participants performed. Participants in the treatment group demonstrated improved blood sugar level control, as measured by HbA1c. This is an interesting, important, result. This study suggests that simply reminding folks to exercise will improve measureable outcomes including HbA1c.
The concept is simple: remind people to exercise and they will achieve measurably better health outcomes. The physiology is perhaps a little more complex, a little more ‘interesting’ in type 1 diabetes (at least from my perspective as an immunology researcher who has type 1 diabetes, not type 2 diabetes), but I would be willing to bet that the principle applies to exercise and type 1 diabetes as well – in fact this research article is strikingly similar to YOUglycemia’s mission J