Diabet Med. 1990 Sep-Oct; 7(8): 744-9.

Diabetes education in the USSR: how to begin?

Starostina EG, Antsiferov MB.

Institute of Diabetes, All-Union Centre for Endocrinology, Moscow, USSR.

To determine patients' attitudes towards diabetes education in the Soviet Union, a questionnaire was distributed throughout the country. From 10,000 completed forms, returned from all regions of the USSR, 2000 were analysed in detail. Responders represented all age and social groups, but patients with shorter duration of diabetes, and women, responded more readily. More than 41% of patients were unaware of the type of diabetes they had, the actual proportions of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes among respondents being 31 and 63%. Rates of chronic complications derived from patients' answers suggest a high rate of underestimation by local physicians. Only 17% of Type 1 and 8% of Type 2 diabetic patients believed that they knew enough about diabetes, and 99.9% of all respondents wanted to learn more about their disease. Independently of the type of diabetes and educational level, patients would accept the information on diabetes from periodicals (63-68%), television (48-63%), booklets for patients (29-31%), as well as attending diabetes courses or classes (30-38%). They expressed preference for teaching conducted by physicians (74-85%) rather than nurses (1-4%). The main areas of interest for Type 1 diabetic patients were technical devices, (artificial pancreas and insulin pumps (85%] and late diabetic complications (78%), and for patients with Type 2 diabetes late complications (84%) and diet (72%). Some respondents (20-25%) expected the use of herbs and other 'non-traditional' methods to be effective in treatment and curing of diabetes. The least requested topics were acute complications (18-34%) and metabolic self-monitoring (0.025%).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)