Randomised Controlled Trial of Structured Personal Care of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is an increasingly common illness that is linked to considerable excessive mortality. There are many indications that treatment of raised blood pressure and blood glucose as well as dyslipidaemia can postpone the development of diabetic complications. Treatment of T2DM is primarily done in general practice, where the results are not satisfactory. The purpose of the project is to create a basis so the existing research-based knowledge can be used to improve the quality of diabetes care in general practice.

The answer will be based on the information from 1,428 newly diagnosed diabetic patients aged 40 or over who were followed since 1989 in a randomised trial among more than 600 general practitioners. The intervention, which ended at the beginning of 1996, provided optimum conditions for follow-up, doctor-patient communication and treatment, among other ways by training the doctors, producing clinical guidelines and setting individual treatment goals. In the project, the general practitioner is seen as the coordinator of the whole health system's prophylactic efforts in relation to the individual diabetic patient.

The aims of a concluding 14-year follow-up are:

• To investigate what long-term effect the project model for structured, personalized diabetes care has on 1) the patients' mortality and development of diabetic complications, 2) the patients' use of services from the primary and secondary sector, 3) the patients' self-rated health and motivation, and 4) the doctor-patient relationship.

Inclusion criteria

• all patients aged 40 or older with newly diagnosed diabetes between 1 March 1989 and 28 February 1991 based on hyperglycaemic symptoms or raised blood glucose values measured in general practice

Exclusion criteria

• threatening somatic disease, severe mental illness, or unwillingness to participate. For our analysis, we also excluded non-white patients and patients whose diagnosis was not established by a blood glucose measurement at a major laboratory within 500 days after diagnosis.