Poor math skills may worsen diabetes control

Absolutely.

"A new study suggests that diabetic adults' ability to work with numbers may affect their management of the disease -- and that, in turn, may help explain racial differences in diabetes control.

A number of studies have found that compared with their white counterparts, African Americans with diabetes tend to have poorer blood sugar control -- as well as higher rates of diabetes complications, like heart disease and kidney failure.

Numbers come into play everyday for people with diabetes -- in counting carbohydrates, adjusting insulin doses and keeping track of blood sugar readings, for instance.

In the new study, published in the journal Diabetes Care, researchers looked at whether patients' diabetes-related 'numeracy' was related to their long-term blood sugar control.

The study included 383 adults with type 2 diabetes who took a test that gauged their ability to conquer a range of number-related tasks -- such as interpreting nutrition labels on packaged foods, calculating calories and carbohydrates in a meal, and keeping track of medication doses.

Overall, the researchers found, patients with the strongest test scores generally had better results on A1C tests, which estimate a person's average blood sugar level over the previous few months.

What's more, number skills seemed to partly explain why African- American patients generally had poorer A1C scores than white patients did.

The current findings suggest that such number skills may be an unrecognized factor, write Dr. Chandra Y. Osborn and colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The authors suggest that the poorer skills could be due in part to less opportunity to take relevant courses, and lower socioeconomic status."

This last part is very, very wrong.

I have been saying for years, as in a more than a decade, that fatso-ness is a math problem. (e.g., here and here.)

Because math is the underlying discipline for Calories in and Calories out.

HOWEVER, there are ways to circumvent the need for good math skills and still lose weight.

See here, here and here.

Of course, educating people in simple math, which is all it takes, is the best way to overcome the matter and derive other benefits, too.