THURSDAY, June 24 (HealthDay News) -- Too few local health
clinics in the United States offer diabetes screening or obesity
prevention programs, according to a nationwide study from the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The clinics, which tend to serve poor clients, need to be "armed
and equipped" to respond to the increasing threat of obesity and
diabetes in the nation, study co-author Ann Albright said in a
Center for the Advancement of Health news release.
She and her colleagues analyzed data from a 2005 survey of 2,300
health clinics and found that about 56 percent of them offered
obesity prevention programs, 51 percent offered diabetes screening,
and only one third offered both.
The findings were of particular concern since the percentage of
obese American adults has doubled from 1980 to 2004, and the
percentage of Americans diagnosed with diabetes may have doubled as
well, according to researchers. People with diabetes and lower
incomes run a higher risk of dying of the disease, research has
shown.
Albright directs the Division of Diabetes Translation, which
translates diabetes research into daily practice, at the CDC's
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion.
One expert questioned the value of obesity and diabetes
screening programs alone. Such programs "are not a big part of the
solution. After all, they are designed to find the trouble, not
necessarily fix it," Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention
Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said in the
news release.
"We should define what contributions health departments can, and should, be making to global efforts at obesity and diabetes prevention and control, and then distribute resources to make sure they can all make these contributions. Otherwise, some will be doing far less than is needed, and some will be doing more than what is truly useful," Katz said.
The CDC findings appear online and in the August print issue of
the
American Journal of Public Health.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more
about
overweight and obesity.