A Centretown-based diabetes education program is joining forces with major health organizations to target at-risk individuals before they develop Type 2 diabetes.
The Community Diabetes Education Program of Ottawa, which provides education sessions to patients with diabetes or at risk of developing the disease, has made education a priority in a new project reaching out to new Canadians in the Ottawa community.
The Ottawa Diabetes Risk Assessment Collaborative will host a series of events that will present the risk of diabetes to adult English as a second language schools in Ottawa.
The project will also individually evaluate students looking for warning signs of the disease.
The risk assessment is aimed at predicting a patient’s likelihood of developing the disease in the next 10 years based on a point system applying factors such as genetic history, gender, age, weight and blood pressure.
"We are born with certain genetic factors that we can’t change, but we can certainly influence them,” says the Ottawa education program’s director, Betty MacGregor.
One of the reasons the program targets new Canadians is because recent studies have shown that the disease is more common in individuals of South Asian, African, African-Caribbean, and Chinese descent.
The Ottawa Neighbourhood Study, based on figures from the 2006 Census, shows how this trend is of particular interest to Centretown.
Twenty-one per cent of Centretown residents immigrated to Canada in the past 10 years – two percentage points higher than the city’s average. Of these new Canadians, 39 per cent are from Asia or the Middle East and 20.3 per cent are from African or African-Caribbean descent.
MacGregor says that these same groups are traditionally absent from the Ottawa diabetes education program, because they are often unaware of their services or the risks of the disease.
Renee Lebovitz Pelletier represents the Canadian Diabetes Association in the partnership. For her, the initiative is also bridging a cultural gap for these new Canadians, by promoting strategies for disease prevention through healthy, active living.
"For many people, it can be the first time they are exposed to this kind of thinking,” says Lebovitz Pelletier, “so we are planting seeds.”
In order to determine whether these seeds have taken root, the collaborative will conduct a follow-up evaluation of the program three months after the initial intervention.
Those who have been identified as high-risk will be directed to the Ottawa education program’s services, where their attendance and behaviour changes will be monitored. An in-class evaluation will also be conducted at schools that have been exposed to the program.
“This is a much more focused, concentrated initiative,” says Lebovitz Pelletier, commenting on the program’s unique research focus. “There is opportunity to provide feedback and follow-up.”
All of the member organizations of the collaborative are observing the results of this pilot project, which reflects a provincial and national push for prevention of the disease, inspired by a series of economic reports published by the CDA.
The CDA report predicts that diabetes will cost the Ontario government approximately $4.9 billion in 2010, and that these numbers are expected to rise dramatically in the future unless steps are taken to curb the onset of Type 2 diabetes.
Although MacGregor doesn’t believe the program is enough to prevent the disease in all cases, it is a starting point in educating new Canadians to the risk of diabetes and opening the door to prevention and healthier living.
"Often, knowledge does make a difference,” says MacGregor.