NIDDK Early Career Investigator Symposium—Leveraging Social Support to Improve Diabetes Self-Management and Health Outcomes—Innovative Methods and Interventions
Saturday, June 22, at 8:00 a.m. ET
Room W311
Orange County Convention Center
You’re Not the Boss of Me!—Innovative Methods and Analyses to Assess the Impact of Caregivers on Diabetes Management and Psychosocial Outcomes of Adolescents with Diabetes
Daniel R. Tilden, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor,
University of Kansas Medical Center
What is your presentation about?
Supportive caregiver involvement has been shown to be a strong predictor of higher levels of quality of life, increased self-management and lower levels of depressive symptoms and A1C among adolescents with type 1 diabetes. Despite the importance of these interactions, there is only limited objective data describing parenting behaviors which might be perceived as supportive or intrusive among adolescents. In this presentation I will discuss our recent data which used an observational scoring method to attempt to quantify these interactions to better understand and describe these behaviors.
How do you hope your presentation will impact diabetes research or care?
Through describing these interactions between adolescents and their caregivers with observational methods, we hope to describe in more detail particular parenting behavior types which may be more strongly associated with desirable outcomes among adolescents with type 1 diabetes. These data can be useful both to help clinicians understand which adolescents and caregivers may be at risk for adverse outcomes and to drive the development of interventions to help caregivers adjust their interactions to improve diabetes outcomes among adolescents.
How did you become involved with this area of diabetes research or care?
As a former high school teacher and both a pediatric and adult endocrinologist, the importance of the interactions between caregivers and adolescents was clear to me early on. My training with my research mentor, Sarah Jaser, PhD, led me to focus on qualitative assessments of these interactions as a part of my long-term goal to develop and implement clinical interventions to improve outcomes for adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes.