An-Najah Staff

Introduction: Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is still considered as a public health problem all over the world, the number of those who developing type II diabetes is increasing. While dietary therapy is highly recommended to be involved in the management therapy of diabetic patient it is still neglected by patients, their families and even by health care providers.
The aim of this study was to asses’ dietary routine practices among type 1 and type2 Palestinian diabetic patients in West Bank.
Research design and method: Quantitative, a cross-sectional, descriptive analytical study was conducted in primary health care centers (Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus).350 patients were randomly selected from September to November, 2015, utilizing questionnaire including five domains; about dietary routine after diabetes.
Results: the age of 32.9% of participants was more than 60 years and 91.7% of them have type 2 DM. Their dietary routine pattern mostly characterized by poor meals preparation (49.4% poor, 10.6% very poor). 33.7%, 17.4% have been evaluated as having poor and very poor family support respectively, Regarding to eating pattern just, 3.7% of participants have a very good eating pattern while 42.3% of them have poor eating pattern. The results also indicated that there was a significant relationship between last HbA1C results and eating pattern as p-value is (0.000< 0.05).in addition, there was a relationship between complications of DM and family support as the p-value (0.018< 0.05) and also represented there was a significant relationship between educational level and meal preparation as the p-value is (0.000< 0.05).
Conclusions: the factors affecting on dietary pattern were, firstly eating pattern (60.2%), then family support (57.8%) and meals preparation (57%).
Recommendation: MOH has to pay more attention for the dietary therapy and include it in management therapy of diabetic patients and teaching session for patients to maintain optimum dietary habits is highly recommended. Family has to consider dietary therapy of diabetic patient while preparing their different meals and helping on reading the nutrition fact label before choosing the meals.
see the full file here