Compliance to self-monitoring of blood glucose among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and its influential factors: a real-world cross-sectional study based on the Tencent TDF-I blood glucose monitoring platform.

BACKGROUND

To investigate the compliance to self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and its influential factors.

METHODS

The real-world SMBG use over 90 days among 415 T2DM patients were recorded by using a blood glucose monitoring platform (TDF-I, Tencent, China). Clinical features including age, sex, duration of diabetes, insulin treatment or not, and use of oral antidiabetic drugs were collected. Poor compliance was defined as the average frequency of weekly SMBG use over 90 days was below the criteria established by the physicians, and otherwise the patients were regarded as with good compliance. Factors affecting the SMBG compliance were analyzed by using independent sample -test, Mann-Whitney U test, and multivariate logistic regression analysis.

RESULTS

Only 57.6% of patients in the study cohort had good compliance to SMBG. Multivariate logistic regression models showed that only the duration of T2DM and the use of oral antidiabetic agents were independently associated with SMBG compliance; more specifically, patients with longer course of disease had poorer SMBG compliance, and those had used oral antidiabetic agents had poorer SMBG compliance.

CONCLUSIONS

SMBG compliance in T2DM patients needs to be further improved. For patients with a longer course of disease and/or under oral antidiabetic medication, interventions such as patient education should be adopted to increase the SMBG compliance.