Objective: Academic health services play an important role in the prevention and control of diabetes mellitus (DM) in Iran. This study aimed at determining the prevalence of DM-related complications and the associated risk factors among patients with DM in a university-affiliated outpatient diabetes clinic of a referral hospital in Southeast of Iran, Zahedan.
Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from January to April 2019 in an academic diabetes clinic. A total of 334 patients with DM, whose characteristics (age, sex, family history of DM, and substance abuse), as well as laboratory and clinical information, were recorded in the baseline forms, were included. The relationship between variables were assessed by Pearson’s correlation coefficient at P-value< 0.05 and using SPSS version 20.0.
Results: The mean age of the participants was 54.27 (±11.57) years. In these patients, DM type 2 was estimated at 99.1%, and the mean duration of the disease was 8.98 (±6.93) years. The findings showed that 77.2% of the patients had poor glycemic control. Also, 85.4% of the patients had fasting blood sugar (FBS) level >126 mg/dL. There was a significant relationship between insulin-dependent therapy and drug abuse (P-value <0.001). The prevalence of hyperlipidemia (68.9%), hypertension (50.6%), retinopathy (29.6%), nephropathy (11.7%), and neuropathy (12.3%) was also determined.
Conclusion: The majority of the patients (77.2%) in this study had poor glycemic control, and 69.9% of them suffered from microvascular complications, macrovascular complications, or both. Therefore, frequent visits accompanied by patient education could help to better diabetes control
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.