Fifteen minutes — that’s all it took to get overweight adults with diabetes to exercise more and begin to lose weight, a new study reports.
Ten minutes were spent on a computer answering questions and about five were used to set some goals and create reminders for doctors to ask patients a few more questions.
This low-cost pilot program run at clinics in Denver and Pueblo could eventually help diabetic patients curb damaging swings in blood sugar, says a report published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
“The recurring cost of this type of intervention should range from almost nothing … to roughly $20 to $75 per year,” said Jim Christian, director of the Pueblo Community Health Center and co-author of the study.
Type II diabetes is on the rise because of increasing obesity in the United States, according to the American Diabetes Association, which estimated that spending on diabetes treatment last year reached $116 billion.
Christian and colleagues at the University of Colorado at Denver School of Medicine and Denver Health enrolled about 300 overweight adults with diabetes in a test program funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Half those patients were “controls” — they were given brochures about the risks of diabetes and the importance of nutrition and exercise in controlling the chronic disease. The remaining patients were part of the “intervention” group, which answered questions about their current lifestyle and set personal goals.
Patients in the intervention group were six times more likely to increase their activity levels than those in the control group, and about twice as likely to lose more than 5 percent of their body weight, according to the new report.
“The program really did work for me,” said Linda Alarid, 49, a Pueblo resident who developed diabetes several years ago.
“My blood sugars were kind of up and I needed to lose weight,” Alarid said. “I started following my own goals, eating better, walking along the river walk here in Pueblo.”
Alarid lost 20 pounds, but declined to say what she weighed.
Nearly one in 10 of the Pueblo Community Health Center’s patients has diabetes, said David Krause, a family physician there and medical c0-director of the center.
“This program was really appealing because it’s fairly low cost, and it’s all pretty straightforward stuff,” Krause said.
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
In the “intervention” group:
• Patients spent 10 minutes answering questions on a computer program, which evaluated their current nutrition and exercise status and spit out five pages of customized information about their risks.
• Patients spent a few minutes writing down their goals for diabetes management, and also the challenges they expected to face meeting those goals.
• Their doctors received a computerized reminder about those goals when pulling up the patients’ health records, which served as a set of talking points during regular appointments.
