Home Health & Hospice Week

Your current and future patients may benefit from new research findings about preventing diabetes.

A lifestyle intervention of reducing fat and calories plus exercising, leading to "modest" weight loss, has proven to reduce the rate of type 2 diabetes in high-risk adults by 58 percent compared to a placebo, says the National Institutes of Health in a release. The study findings have persisted over 10 years. Using the drug metformin has also proven to reduce the rate of type 2 diabetes in the group, NIH adds.

Both interventions save on health care costs and improve outcomes, notes the study published in the April 2012 Diabetes Care. "Lifestyle changes were especially beneficial for people age 60 and older," the NIH release notes.

"These approaches make economic sense," the study's lead author William Herman, director of the Michigan Center for Diabetes Translation-al Research in Ann Arbor, says in the release.

"The diabetes epidemic, with more than 1.9 million new cases per year in the United States, can be curtailed," says study chair David Nathan, director of the Diabetes Research Center at Massachu-setts General Hospital in Boston. "We now show that these interventions also represent good value for the money."