Community Action to Prevent Diabetes

The East Harlem Partnership for Diabetes Prevention, a community-academic partnership, was formed to plan and carry out an intervention to prevent or control diabetes in a predominantly non-English speaking, low socio-economic Latino and African American community with a high incidence of the disease. A 20 member Community Action Board (CAB), composed of community residents, clergy, health and social service providers and medical school faculty, used community based participatory research(CBPR) methods to address pre-diabetes among overweight adults and (then) piloted and evaluated a peer led diabetes prevention intervention led program in English and Spanish. CBPR research principles were used to form the CAB, assess the community's health, select the research questions, develop a study design, methodology, and recruitment/enrollment strategies and translate the results for community and academic audiences. Through partner-led recruitment efforts, 99 pre-diabetes study participants were enrolled and randomly assigned to an intervention group (a facilitated lifestyle intervention) or control group (delayed intervention). Participants were followed at three, six and twelve months to assess weight loss outcomes. Both the intervention and control groups lost weight at the twelve month follow up (n=72) however, the intervention group lost a significant percentage of their body weight (4.3%) in comparison to the control group (2.4%)(p<0.01) Community partner-led recruitment efforts were the most successful strategy, with 72% of participants recruited versus 0% recruited through physician referrals. Based on the positive pilot study results, the community-academic partnership wrote and was awarded a five-year grant to expand the pilot into a large-scale community-based diabetes prevention intervention.