Diabetes self-care behaviours and clinical outcomes among Taiwanese patients with type 2 diabetes.

We examined the influences of patients' background characteristics on the frequency of performing five diabetes self-care behaviours that 185 Taiwanese outpatients reported. All patients had type 2 diabetes diagnosed for more than a year and attended an outpatient clinic at a large university hospital where they had received at least one dietitian-led individual nutrition education session and one nurse-led diabetes education session during the course of their care. Seventy nine percent of the patients regularly (defined as responses often or always on the questionnaire) took their medications and over half followed recommended meal plans and exercised, but fewer performed foot care (38%) or checked their blood glucose levels (20%) regularly. The associations between patients' demographics and disease-related characteristics and their performance of self-care behaviours were assessed with logistic regression. Although checking blood glucose levels and performing diabetes foot care were unrelated to any clinical outcome examined, patients who took their diabetes medications had lower hemoglobin A1c levels and fewer chronic complications than those who did not. Furthermore, patients who followed a diabetes meal plan also had lower hemoglobin A1c levels, and those who exercised regularly had healthier body mass indices (BMI) than those who did not.