Friday, February 8, 2008

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Brief one-on-one lifestyle counseling by doctors during routine office visits appears to help some people with diabetes boost their physical activity levels and lose weight, according to a new study.

Knowing that time constrains make it difficult for physicians to adequately address lifestyle modifications with their patients, James G. Christian, from the Pueblo Community Health Center, and his associates tested the effect of brief lifestyle counseling by physicians when patients with type 2 diabetes were seen during routine visits.

The team developed a program in which "self-management goals for nutrition and physical activity were set using a tailored computer program." A separate report generated for the physician provided a bulleted summary and patient-specific counseling recommendations.

"The intervention was simple and the burden on physicians was low," the researchers say.

To test the program, Christian's group randomly assigned 141 diabetic patients to the counseling intervention and 132 to a usual-care control group.

At the end of the program, the rate of successful weight loss was 50 percent higher in the counseling group than in the control group, they report. Although average changes in weight did not differ markedly between groups, far more counseled diabetics were able to sustain weight loss of at least 6 pounds after 1 year (32 percent versus 19 percent).

The counseled patients were also more likely than the control patients to engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity or exercise per week.

"It is noteworthy that participants in this study reported that the support from their physician was the most important part of the intervention," write Drs. David D. McManus and Ira S. Ockene at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, in an accompanying editorial. "Physicians often under-estimate the value of even brief counseling efforts."

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, January 28, 2008.