Internet Usage May Improve Quality of Life (QoL) in Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus Patients

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Author Info

Ravindra Shukla Divyangi Mishra

Corresponding Author

Ravindra Shukla
Associate Professor, Department of Endocrinology & Metabolism, AIIMS Jodhpur, India

A B S T R A C T

Objective: To delineate the effect of self-gained information through internet on glycemic control and overall QoL in type 1 diabetes patient. Methodology: 35 type 1 diabetes patients, who had reasonably good glycemic control were classified by a single clinician into net- savvy and ordinary based on their behaviour towards use of internet to gather information regarding health queries and their glycemic control and QoL analysed.WHO-5 questionnaire which is used in clinical practise was applied. Result: Of net savvy group (n=18), 14 (82%) had WHO-5 score greater than 13 while among ordinary (n=17) only 7 had WHO5 of same range. Thus, those who surfed internet were in general likely to have better QoL. Among net savvy group all had individual smart phones and used google as search engine. Among ordinary, 40% (9/17) had smart phones. The mean HbA1c of net savvy group was 7.2 which was lower than that of ordinary group mean HbA1c of 7.6. Those of net savvy group were more likely to agree to increase in number of s.c. insulin injections (12/18) as compared to ordinary group (4/17). The self-reported hypoglycemia episodes were also more in net savvy group (6/ person-week) as compared to ordinary (2/ person- week). Conclusion: Use of smart search engines like google (with strong in-built Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems), even if unsupervised, should be encouraged as part of DSME in type 1 Diabetes patients for optimizing glycemic control and detecting hypoglycemic episodes.

Article Info

Article Type

Research Article

Publication history

Received: Sat 11, Jul 2020
Accepted: Thu 23, Jul 2020
Published: Mon 10, Aug 2020

Copyright

© 2023 Ravindra Shukla. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.JDMC.2020.01.06