Diabetes

Help patients know their prediabetes risk

. 2 MIN READ

It’s likely that a portion of your patient population has prediabetes, the precursor to type 2 diabetes. Today, use Diabetes Alert Day to raise awareness of prediabetes with your patients, and learn what you can do to help prevent progression to type 2 diabetes.

This Diabetes Alert Day, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and other national organizations are urging patients to know their risk of diabetes. The day provides an opportunity to identify new cases of diabetes so your patients can receive the treatment they need. 

Send your patients to the ADA’s Diabetes Alert Day website so they can take the online Diabetes Risk Test - and take the test yourself.  It’s quick and easy.

Diabetes Alert Day can also help you identify patients with prediabetes, educate them about diabetes prevention and refer them to local programs that can help prevent diabetes. Take action in your practice with a new toolkit from the AMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The toolkit is part of the AMA and CDC’s multi-year partnership, Prevent Diabetes STAT: Screen, Test, Act – Today, to help physicians tap diabetes prevention programs in their communities or online. In 2012, the CDC launched the National Diabetes Prevention Program based on research led by the National Institutes of Health, which showed that individuals at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes who participated in structured lifestyle change programs saw a significant reduction in the incidence of the disease.

For the past year, as part of its Improving Health Outcomes initiative, the AMA worked with the YMCA of the USA and 11 physician practice pilot sites in four states to increase physician screening for prediabetes and referral of patients with prediabetes to diabetes prevention programs offered by local YMCAs—which use the CDC’s program. 

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