FRIDAY, Nov. 2 (HealthDay News) -- There is some good news in Americans' fight against diabetes: affected individuals are doing a better job at self-monitoring their blood glucose, and fewer diabetics report that they have developed heart disease, according to two reports published Nov. 2 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In the first study, Liping Pan, M.D., and colleagues used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and found that self-monitoring rates among U.S. adult diabetics increased by 22 percent between 1997 and 2006. By 2006, over 63 percent of surveyed individuals indicated that they checked their blood sugar at least once a day, which exceeds the goal of 61 percent set by the Healthy People 2010 initiative.
In the second study, Nilka R. Burrows, and colleagues analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey and found that the prevalence of self-reported cardiovascular disease (CVD) in U.S. adult diabetics decreased by 11 percent between 1997 and 2005. Furthermore, the rates of CVD in black adults with diabetes decreased by more than 25 percent during the same time period.
"The decrease in self-reported CVD prevalence in persons with diagnosed diabetes might be a result of decreasing rates of certain CVD risk factors (e.g., high total blood cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking), development of new pharmacologic agents such as statins, or of increasing use of preventive treatments, such as daily aspirin therapy," the authors write.
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