Walking and Type 2 Diabetes

Abstract

If you need another reason to prioritize physical activity for your patients with type 2 diabetes, it is provided in the study by Di Loreto et al. (1) published in this issue of Diabetes Care . Results from the study show that you can get impressive improvements in health and reductions in health care costs just by getting your patients with type 2 diabetes to make modest increases in physical activity. A second message is that you can produce these increases in physical activity in a large proportion of your patients with a simple counseling program that requires only a modest commitment of time and effort. A unique aspect of the study is that the results were analyzed in a way to provide some guidance on how much physical activity is required for health and financial benefits in this population. Keep in mind that these analyses were obtained from a post hoc analysis of the data and must be treated with caution until confirmed by other prospective studies. Nonetheless, the results strongly suggest that small, achievable increases in physical activity can have a big impact on health in this population. In this study, all patients were given a counseling program designed to increase physical activity by at least 10 MET h/week. After 2 years, the results were analyzed based on how much physical activity was actually performed. The authors found significant health benefits with increases in physical activity of >10 MET h/week, and they suggest that this is the minimum increase in physical activity required to achieve health and financial benefits in sedentary patients with type 2 diabetes. Further, they found that the health benefits of …