Awareness of Diabetes Mellitus: A cross sectional study

Introduction: Diabetes Mellitus is a silent killer disease. More efforts have been devoted to educate the public about diabetes. Nevertheless, the effect of such efforts has however to be properly appraised. It is important to identify areas of knowledge that might require additional educational efforts.
Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the general public’s knowledge of diabetes. The respondents were required to answer 45 questions from a pre-tested questionnaire divided into five main sections, namely, general knowledge, risk factors, symptoms and complications, treatment, and management, and monitoring. One score was awarded for correct responses and zero score was given for wrong or unsure responses. The maximum score was 41. Data was collected from a total of 330 subjects.
Results and Discussion: It was found that the samples had highest score, 83.3% in diabetic monitoring and lowest score, 62.3% in diabetic risk factors. The mean score obtained by the respondents was 66.1% of the maximum possible total scores (i.e. 27.1 points out of 41). The “correct answer” percentages for the individual questions from each section ranges from 20.1 to 81.3% (General knowledge), 29.4 to 88.8% (Risk factors), 45.8 to 79.5% (Symptoms and complications), 32.8 to 84.7% (Treatment and management), and 55.8  to 91.1% (Monitoring).
Conclusion: The public as represented by the samples in this study is generally well informed about diabetes except for a few areas. Investigation of these areas would have a noteworthy allegation for future public education programme. Health care professionals should be more active in publicizing health information about diabetes.