Groups of adults at risk for diabetes harbor different perceptions of the disease, say researchers. The findings could lead to new approaches for education and prevention.
“We found that there are differences in the perceptions of those who are at risk for diabetes that depend on the specific characteristics that place them at risk,” says Shiela Strauss, associate professor of nursing and co-director of the statistics and data management core for NYU’s Colleges of Nursing and Dentistry.
Illness perceptions, the organized cognitive representations and beliefs that people hold about a condition, are recognized as important determinants of self-care behaviors and outcomes in patients. The way that people mentally represent their conditions has a concrete effect on how they manage these conditions and therefore on their prognoses.
With illness perceptions strongly linked to patient outcomes, Strauss’ research, the first in the field to examine illness perceptions in persons at-risk for diabetes based on their individual risk factors, may be influential in designing care to better fit patients on a case-by-case basis.
Strauss and colleagues assessed each participant’s general diabetes knowledge and administered a questionnaire to measure eight dimensions of diabetes illness perceptions among the sample.
They used the data to examine statistically significant differences among the eight dimensions of diabetes illness perceptions according to the presence or absence of their diabetes risk factors.
