Abstract:

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a clinical syndrome characterized by hyperglycemia due to absolute or relative deficiency of insulin. Long-standing metabolic derangement can lead to the development of complications which are short term (hypoglycemia and hyperosmolar hyperglycemic nonketotic syndrome) and long term ones (retinopathy, nephropathy, neuropathy and cardiovascular). Diabetes touches many families as more than 420 million people live with diabetes worldwide and this number has quadrupled since 1980 (global report from WHO;2016), rising from 4.7% to 8.5%. Tanzania is among the five sub-Saharan African countries with the highest rate of type 2DM. Current data from IDF of 2017 stated that there were 897,000 new cases of diabetes in the country, a prevalence rise of 3.6% from baseline, where in Zanzibar it is 3.7% (2021). But little is known on awareness regarding the complications among Zanzibaris.

Objective: Aim of this study is to assess the awareness of diabetic complications among diabetic patients attending diabetic clinic at Mnazimmoja Hospital Zanzibar.

Methodology: A cross sectional study was conducted among 200 diabetic patients attending diabetic clinic at MMH. The sampling method was simple random and questionnaire was used to obtain data which was analyzed by using SPSS program. Ethical clearance was sought from the joint CUHAS and BMC research and ethics review committee but also from the vice presidential office of Zanzibar and MMH managing directorates office.

Results: A total of 200 participants were including in the study. The 49.0% had good level of knowledge on diabetes and its complications and it showed that there is an association between age and the knowledge on the diseases (p=0.001). Unlike knowledge, the attitude towards diabetes was poor in majority (92%) and level of education had no significant effect on attitude. With regards to practices, more than half of study subjects had positive practices as they had tendency of checking blood sugar regularly, doing exercises and etc. and on the factors associated with diabetic complications majority stated that risk is highly responsible (75%), followed by sedentary life (73%), obesity (70%) and etc.

Conclusion and recommendations: Even through the 49.0% of the participants had good level of knowledge on diabetes and its complications and more than 70% of the participants had good practice on method of preventing the occurrence of the complications, there attitude towards the disease was very poor (92%). It appears that the higher knowledge on diabetes did not translate into positive attitude towards the disease. Therefore, more emphasis should be given to address the issue of poor attitude towards diabetes mellitus and its complications among general public in Zanzibar, most especially now that the patient are supposed to attend their local health centers for their routine clinic visits when most of these health centers lack medical staffs that provide education regarding the disease and sometimes even medicines not as in MMH.