Barriers to effective insulin treatment: the persistence of poor glycemic control in type 2 diabetes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Contrary to longstanding recommendations on type 2 diabetes (T2D) management, the de facto standard of care in Canada includes lag times of many years prior to introducing effective glycemic control. Even patients transitioned to insulin may continue to experience poor glycemic control, with attendant diabetic complications, suggesting poor adherence or inadequate dose titration. OBJECTIVE: To identify barriers to timely and effective use of insulin in T2D. METHODS: PubMed searches were conducted to find research articles on insulin initiation, adherence and intensification. Also, because recent data on the consequences of intensive glycemic control may be taken as justification for relaxing glycemic targets, a secondary search on this literature was conducted, including the UKPDS and ACCORD trials, plus post hoc and meta-analyses of these data. No formal evaluation of level of evidence was conducted while researching this narrative literature review. FINDINGS: Timely, effective glycemic control remains an important clinical goal but is complicated by patient, physician and treatment factors. Patient barriers to accepting insulin initiation include fear of hypoglycemia, injections and weight gain, and reluctance to accommodate the inflexible timing of scheduled insulin doses. Adherence issues, including dose omission, are common and are associated with some of the same factors. Fear of hypoglycemia also underlies many physicians' reluctance to prescribe insulin. Caregivers' failure to provide training or answer questions about insulin's risks and benefits was also associated with low patient adherence. Poor communication may also be at fault when patients on insulin fail to titrate or intensify their treatment adequately. Conversely, glycemic control can be significantly improved by facilitating ongoing communication between patients and caregivers. DISCUSSION: Although innovations in injectable therapy for T2D may help address the current pattern of poor glycemic control, improved communication between patients and caregivers is also a powerful approach and can be implemented with existing therapies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.069 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".