Dr Richard Brostrom, State TB Branch Chief and Pacific Regional Medical Officer, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
(Image by Citizen News Service (CNS)) Details DMCA
During the ongoing 5th Asia Pacific Region Conference on Lung Health of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union) in Sydney, Dr Richard Brostrom, State TB Branch Chief and Pacific Regional Medical Officer, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spoke to CNS about his team's innovative and integrated approach to deal with this dual burden.
One patient with two diseases!
According to Brostrom, "TB-diabetes co-morbidity is a global problem, but we in the Pacific region see it as a local problem and approach it from the patient's perspective - it is about one patient with two diseases. Rather than divide the care, we try to integrate the care for each patient. Once we started doing a blood glucose test for every adult TB patient the number of TB patients with diabetes became very high. It is known now that 60% of the adult Pacific islanders with TB also have diabetes. And many of them are unaware of their diabetes status when they first come to a TB clinic."
So this is a unique region where a majority of patients with active TB also have diabetes.
"This does not give us the luxury of building a special programme to deal with this problem but instead integrate TB and diabetes care. We not only check for diabetes in all our TB patients but also try to check for TB in diabetes clinics. This serves two purposes - find TB cases that are in a diabetes clinic and get an opportunity for prevention of TB. People with diabetes are a high-risk group for TB and so it makes sense to test them for latent TB infection and then give them preventive medicine so that they do not reach active TB stage. There is a list of special interventions for our clinicians to remind them that people with diabetes may have special needs - medication doses might have to be adjusted for those TB-diabetes patients who have kidney problem; we also have to look for drug resistance, as more and more drug resistance is associated with diabetes patients. Then again, we know that in people with diabetes, TB relapse rates are 3-4 times higher than in TB patients without diabetes. So in the Pacific, we very often treat TB patients with diabetes for 9 months, instead of the normal 6 months, to prevent relapse," said Dr Brostrom.
Dr Brostrom and his team have trained their TB-clinic staff to manage diabetes, in order to maximize quality of care and improve TB-treatment outcomes. The DOTS providers, community workers and nurses have been given basic diabetes education. With help from Australian Respiratory Council a flipchart of diabetes education has been developed to go along with TB education. A TB-healthcare provider makes 100 home visits of a TB patient during his/her TB-treatment period. It is during these regular face-to-face interactions that the patients are told on how to manage their diabetes, along with ensuring that they are swallowing their TB drugs.
"This has really helped in reducing the patients' glucose levels. As long as they are under TB treatment, we provide them with long lasting information for keeping their diabetes under control. This repeated teaching is done not only of the patients, but also of their family members. Messages are simple and repeated. Our TB nurses do not talk about diabetes medication, but they are competent to advice about the benefits of optimum food portion sizes, substituting carbohydrates with vegetables, and exercising. A typical TB patient with diabetes has very little understanding about diabetes and its risk factors. So this education really helps. When the patients get a chance to sit down with a nurse in their living room or kitchen, who not only gives them their TB medicine but talks about their diabetes too, it makes the whole issue more humane," feels Dr Brostrom.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
