Dr Jaime Davidson Outlines Unmet Needs to Improve Diabetes Care

Physician, patient, and caregiver education is important to improve diabetes care, said Jaime A. Davidson, MD, FACP, MACE, professor of medicine, Touchstone Diabetes Center, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Transcript

What is the number one unmet need in diabetes that you would like to solve first?

There are many. There are so many. The first thing is to think that it’s better to prevent and we have different types of prevention; one is primary prevention. That’s preventing diabetes. That requires educating the public, the family members of somebody with diabetes, educate their physicians in primary care, in endocrinology, in cardiology.

And then there’s secondary prevention. That means somebody already has diabetes, we don’t want that patient to have complications. So, we need to educate the patients to take better care of their glucose levels, to take the medications properly. We give them a drug to lower cholesterol, they need to know they need to take it on a regular basis. If they’re taking blood pressure medications, why should they take them? When they should take them? And it is polypharmacy. And whenever we have polypharmacy, the adherence to those drugs goes down. So, one thing that is a real unmet need, is to teach physicians, as well as patients, that adherence is very important.