Khalid Mahmood, Aamir A H.
Glycemic control status in patients with type-2 diabetes.
J Coll Physicians Surg Pak Jan ;15(6):323-5.

Objective: To assess the status of glycaemic control in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus (DM) in NWFP, Pakistan. Design: Observational study. Place and Duration of Study: Medical Out-patient Department (OPD), Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar and a private clinic of physician from January 2003 to December 2003. Patients and Methods: Two hundred and ten patients with type-2 diabetes were included in the study. The glycemic control of these patients was determined by estimation of blood glucose (fasting and random) and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c). The patients were grouped in three categories, the 1st one having good glycaemic control, the 2nd having fair (acceptable) glycaemic control and the 3rd group having poor diabetic control with their HbA1c values being 6%-7%, 7.1%-8.2% and >8.2% respectively. Statistical analysis of the results was made by application of Pearson`s chi-square test and student`s t-test. Results: Around half, 51.43%, of the patients had poor control of diabetes, with mean HbA1c of 10.183 ± 1.73 SD (standard deviation) and were placed in category 3. Good control of diabetes accounted for 31.43% of our patients having mean HbA1c of 6.64 ± 0.27 SD and were placed in category-1. The rest, 17.14%, were placed in fair control category having mean HbA1c value of 7.68 ± 0.44 SD. Conclusion: Majority of our patients with type-2 diabetes are having poor control of their glycaemic status.

USER COMMENTS

One question and two comments.---- Question: Authors wrote "The patients were then asked to get their fasting blood glucose and lipid profile done and bring back the results during the followup visit.", My question is who paid for the tests? Patients or authors or author's instituion. This was a prospective study not a retrospective study (chart review), therefore, I hope that patients were not asked to pay the bill for author's desire to get published.---- First Comment. There is a typing error in the 2nd line of fourth paragraph of Results section. p-value was not <0.05, but it was >0.05.-------Second Comment. I can't understand that why the authors did not use regression analysis? Regression analysis would have given much better results. Authors artificially divided a continous variable (HgbA1c) into categorical variable and then did multiple statistical tests without correcting for multiple tests. If we correct p-values for multiple tests (using bonferroni's correction), there is no significant p-value.
Posted by: rqayyum on Jun 2005

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