How the Diabetes PHD Works: A Hypothetical Patient

Access the diabetes PHD

For a direct link to the diabetes PHD tool, click here: www.diabetes.org/diabetesphd.

This Diabetes PHD (Personal Health Decisions) tool calculates a person's risk for diabetes, heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, and foot and eye complications of diabetes based on the person's current characteristics, as shown in the Figure.

The PHD tool also gives people the opportunity to see the effects that changes in their lifestyle or use of medications or other therapies would have on their future health, as illustrated in the following example of a hypothetical patient.

Hypothetical Patient

The hypothetical patient depicted in the Figure is a 56-year-old white woman with the following characteristics: height, 5' 4"; weight, 170 lb; blood pressure (BP), 141/89 mm Hg; low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), 135 mg/dL; high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, 36 mg/dL; total cholesterol, 210 mg/dL; fasting plasma glucose, 115 mg/dL. The patient is a current smoker; she started smoking at age 17 years. She has a family history of diabetes. She is not taking aspirin, hypertensive medications, or cholesterol-lowering agents.

The possible risk reduction shown in the Figure is based on this patient losing 11 lb, lowering her LDL-C level to 132 mg/dL, reducing her systolic BP to 138 mm Hg, and stopping smoking.

Although various algorithms are available for assessing a person's risk for diabetes, such tools are woefully underused in clinical practice.

Access the diabetes PHD

For a direct link to the diabetes PHD tool, click here: www.diabetes.org/diabetesphd.