The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released a series of 10 guiding principles for the provision of healthcare in the treatment of diabetes, which are expected to be clinically useful in both the management of the disease and its prevention. The Guiding Principles for the Care of People With or at Risk for Diabetes document was presented by the National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) to address the identification of the disease, self-management support, physical activity, and blood glucose control among other topics.
“There are a lot of diabetes guidelines out there, and practitioners and patients can get confused about which they should follow,” explained the director of the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health, Judith Fradkin, M.D. “With these Guiding Principles, we aren’t creating new guidelines, but clarifying where there is general agreement across myriad diabetes guidelines. Guiding Principles represents a set of sound practices. Our goal in developing this resource is to help clinicians help their patients with diabetes.”
The guiding principles were released in the hope of improving the quality of life and reducing the burden of the more than 29 million Americans who currently live with diabetes, as well as the other 86 million with prediabetes. The NDEP is a partnership of both the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the program has more than 200 partners in order to provide materials and resources not only to healthcare professionals, but also to the general public, patients, and business professionals.
“Guiding Principles is the result of a major collaborative effort from a varied group of experts who are committed to improving the care for people with or at risk for diabetes,” added the NIDDK Director Griffin P. Rodgers, M.D., about the document that had already been supported by more than a dozen of federal agencies and professional organizations. “These principles represent the cornerstone of diabetes management and prevention.”
As a division of the NIH, the NIDDK is responsible for conducting and supporting research not only on diabetes, but also on other endocrine and metabolic diseases, as well as digestive diseases, nutrition, obesity, kidney, urologic and hematologic diseases. Therefore, the work of the institute is dedicated to reducing the burden of a wide spectrum of the most common, severe, and disabling diseases that affect Americans of all ages and ethnicities.
