Abstract
Objective: To determine the relationship between the health literacy of patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) and the accessibility of internet surfing for information concerning DM.Methods: A multistage stratified sampling method was utilized to conduct a questionnaire survey on DM health literacy and internet accessibility among 1,563 patients with DM in Gansu Province in 2020. Logistic regression was performed to analyze the factors that influence health literacy and internet accessibility; while the chi-square test was used to compare the differences in needs.Results: Among 1,563 valid questionnaires collected with an effective rate of 95.7%, there were 65.4, 66.3, or 51.1% of patients with DM were found to have good health knowledge, attitudes, or practice levels, respectively. Occupation, income, disease course of DM, and accessibility to the internet were the main factors influencing health literacy. Age, residency, occupation, education, income, and family history of DM were the factors influencing accessibility to internet surfing for DM. The expectations from patients with DM for the capacity to obtain DM information from traditional sources or through internet sources was 1,465 (93.7%) or 1,145 (73.3%), respectively. Patients with DM had a 2-fold higher desire to obtain DM health information from internet media if the patients had access to the internet than those without (P < 0.05).Conclusions: The socioeconomic status and access to the internet were the main contributing factors for health literacy, as socioeconomic status is closely related to access to the internet.
Highlights
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the major fast growing noncommunicable disease (NCD) threats to global public health (1)
Our data demonstrate that the knowledge, attitude, practice, and health literacy about diabetes in patients with DM were 65.4, 66.3, 51.1, or 52.9%, respectively (Figure 2)
We found that the health literacy of patients with DM in Gansu remained at a reasonable level compared with others in China (30), and these patients had a positive attitude toward the prevention and treatment of diabetes
Summary
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the major fast growing noncommunicable disease (NCD) threats to global public health (1). The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) reports that there were 463 million adults with DM in 2019 and estimates it will reach 700 million in 2045 (2). The number of patients with DM has increased from 110 million in 2017 (3) to 116 million in 2019 in China (4), and the estimated number will be 120 million by 2045 (5). Gansu Province, located in the Northwest of China, is relatively underdeveloped with the lowest GDP in China, mainly due to its geographic location (6). It is highly concerning that the prevalence of DM in Gansu has increased from 3.2% in 1999 (8) to 10.6% in 2019 (9), which has attracted extremely high attention from the local health authority
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