Objectives

To provide:

• Access and expert consultation for state-of-the-art measurement tools in the domains relevant to diabetes prevention and control research, for example: measurement of nutrition, physical activity/exercise, behavioral/psychosocial factors, health related quality of life, economic evaluations, and health care quality.
• Design, data management, and analytic support for research to prevent and control diabetes and its complications, for example: interventions to optimize weight, exercise, medication adherence, or glycemic and blood pressure control. These studies will include but also go beyond traditional clinical trials. For example, group-randomized trials evaluating weight loss interventions in diabetic patients in community medical practices require specialized expertise in trial design, data capture and transfer, as well as in interventional and analytic tools.
• Access to large pre-existing national datasets for secondary data analyses to test hypotheses in the prevention and control of diabetes and cardiometabolic disease using pre-existing data, for example: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), Medicare data, the national database being generated for the NIH REGARDS study based at UAB, multi-center federally funded ongoing studies such as the NIDDK LookAhead or the NHLBI CARDIA.
• Development of methodological innovations in diabetes prevention and control research, for example: the current performance measures for quality of care in diabetes are limited in scope and impact; how can we improve/transform these measures to facilitate the ultimate goal--improved patient outcomes?
• Effective implementation and dissemination efforts to maximize the likelihood that the knowledge produced by the DRTC research base benefits populations at risk and patients with diabetes and cardiometabolic disease.