DIABETES SELF-CARE IN CORRELATION WITH FASTING BLOOD GLUCOSE LEVELS AND DURATION OF DIABETES DIAGNOSIS

Background: Self-care in diabetes mellitus (DM) is a key to management and less complications. Aim: We aimed to investigate the association between DM self-care and duration of diabetes diagnosis as well as fasting blood glucose (FBG) levels. Methods: This study adapts an analytical cross-sectional study design. We used the Arabic version of the Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities (SDSCA) validated tool to assess self-care for DM and correlate it FBG levels and duration of diabetes diagnosis. We used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26 for data analysis. We performed descriptive analysis and we used Pearson’s correlation for inferential statistics where a p-value that is equal to or less than 0.05 is deemed statistically significant. Results:  Average SDSCA score among participants was 3.2±1.6. Our study found that time since DM diagnosis was significantly correlated with exercise subdomain score (p=0.000) as well as the FBG level (p=0.001). FBG levels were negatively correlated with SDSCA score (p=0.000) and all of its subdomains (p<0.01). Conclusion: Our study concludes that there is a significant correlation between diabetes self-care and FBG levels. Our results showed that the higher the SDSCA score, the lower average FBG levels were.