Respond to at least two peers with a review and critique of their chosen methods. Minimum of 1-2 paragraphs.

Respond to at least two peers with a review and critique of their chosen methods. Minimum of 1-2 paragraphs.

Diabetes prevention program

 

Minghao Ji

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are 37.3 million Americans have diabetes, which constitutes 11.3% of the U.S. population, and 96 million adults have prediabetes, or 38% of the U.S. adult population (2022). National Diabetes Prevention Program is a CDC initiative partnered with many local programs throughout the nation. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of one of the local Diabetes Prevention Programs, we can devise a method:

 

Participants

            A prevention program requires an extended period to evaluate its effectiveness, but a long period has an increased risk of dropouts and difficulty for participants to stay compliant with such a program. Therefore, enrolling local primary care providers for signing up participants and following up on studies would be beneficial. Since this study is not going to consider individual risk factors for diabetes, we can use the CDC Prediabetes Screen Test to screen for participants. This screening test would give us a score ranging from 0 to 27, indicating the participants’ risk, and a score above 9 indicating high risk, and we can then consent the high-risk patients for the study. We will exclude the patients who already have diabetes and those with low risks because diabetic patients will require interventions other than prevention and the low-risk population would have limited benefit from this study.

            The enrolled participants will be asked whether they would like to take part in this prevention program and provided with the program details. These participants will be assessed again yearly by following up with their primary providers.

 

Data Collection and Analysis

             The independent variable is the participants’ compliance with the diabetes prevention program. Some people may have enrolled in the program but failed to adhere to the required activities, while others may only adhere to parts of the program, i.e., following the diet requirement, but not the activity requirement. Therefore, we can divide the participants into three groups: non-participation (following <20% of the program requirements), partial-participation (following 20%-80% of requirements), and full-participation (following >80%). This division would better categorize the objects’ participation status, and allow the researchers to evaluate whether partially participating in this prevention program would have an impact on the outcome at all.

            The dependent variable would be the patients’ annual fasting blood sugar test. Although this test is not as accurate as Hgb A1C in diagnosing and managing diabetes, Hgb A1C is not routinely administered for people who don’t actively have diabetes or prediabetes. Since the participants are being studied for the effectiveness of the prevention program, many may not require Hgb A1C, instead, fasting blood sugar can be taken as a part of a routine chemistry panel that providers often order.

            The statistical data of the blood sugar tests (average, standard deviation, min, max, etc.) can be used to compare with each of the three categories of participants during each period. If a participant changes his participation status during the study, his category will be adjusted accordingly. For example, if the participant spent the first half of a cycle fully participating and the second half non-participating, he would be a 50% participant and therefore changed to the partial-participation category. If a participant develops diabetes during a cycle, he would be counted for the previous cycle to account for whether the prevention program had a relationship; however, he will be dropped out of the rest of the study, since managing diabetes is outside the scope of this research. This process will be repeated each year since people are commonly advised to follow up with their primary provider annually, which would be convenient for ongoing study. The result of this study would indicate whether fully or partially participating in this diabetes prevention program can influence blood sugar levels compared to non-participants after X years.

 

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022, June 29). National Diabetes Statistics Report. CDC.gov. retrieved from  https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statistics-report/index.html

CDC Prediabetes Screening Test. (n.d.). National Diabetes Prevention Program. Retrieved from  https://crowwingenergized.org/wp-lib/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/prediabetestest.pdf

 

Conny ortega

  When COVID-19 became a world pandemic back in 2020, many questions were asked on how it traveled, how people were getting infected and how we stop the spreading of it.  In December of 2020 essential workers and those 65 and older were the first ones to receive the vaccines. In May of 2021 all individuals 12 and older were eligible for the vaccines. Fast forward to 2022, there is several immunization programs to help those still not vaccinated from getting the virus that easy. 

   There were many COVID-19 cases that had to be tracked and analyzed. Mixed method procedures were done to be able to get accuracy and validity data. Quantitative methods were use when they gave the population surveys to fill out their symptoms, who they were living with and so on. In doing surveys as such much of the information may have been misleading and not true as people would falsify information, and when this happens, the data received can be easily manipulated and false. Qualitative methods rely on text and image data, have unique steps in data analysis, and draw on diverse designs (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). There was an immense of information to be collected from all the countries to have significant data. Qualitative methods were used to provide people with actual charts and graphs where we could visually see the data collected and made it possibly easier to understand. 

I think having both qualitative and quantitative methods help with gathering important information. You need both to collect possibly the same information but in different ways. 

References

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018).  Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (Fifth). SAGE Publications, Inc.