Can knowing where you live help shape diabetes treatment?

Student researcher Olohitare "Abby" Abaku is creating a tool to help clinicians create personalized treatment plans for diabetes patients.

Geolocational data, which shows where patients live and what resources they have access to, may determine how best to manage their disease.

University of Maryland School of Medicine summer research student Olohitare "Abby" Abaku is using a large-scale geolocational diabetes registry to see how proximity to health care, food, and other essential community resources impacts patients’ ability to properly manage their diabetes.

Abaku and her team hypothesized that greater distance to essential resources like grocery stores would have a negative impact on the risk for glycemic control — maintaining blood glucose levels within a target range to prevent other health complications.

The team not only found a strong correlation, but also noted that underserved and predominantly low-income communities are more likely to be food deserts, exacerbating health discrepancies.

Questions

What are you studying?

Basically we were taking a data set that we had called GPS health, which geolocates individual everyday people's addresses and kind of sees their proximity to different health access, food access, SNAP retailer, all of that. And we're trying to see with our database that we have with the UMMS diabetes registry, we want to see if there's any connection between their access to care and access to healthy foods. 

What did you expect to find?

So, we kind of hypothesized that the farther you live from a healthy food access like grocery store and the type of it, if it's a grocery store, if it's a convenience store, corner store, it would affect the diabetes outcome that you had and it would increase that lower management risk for glycemic control. 

What did you find?

We found that obviously those underserved communities with those predominantly low-income POC families tend to live in those food deserts and it creates that health discrepancy between different individuals of their access to food. 

What is your goal?

I'm hoping that like clinical management, care plans can be more individualized per person and not just a number. And I hope it can inform more health policies and allow us to build more equitable, healthy resources for different individuals in different areas. 

For example, between me and someone a couple streets down, they may have a community center that has a grocery store. They may have a community center, have a health care facility, a clinic, emergency room. But compared to me, I might not have that, even though I might live close or I might live far. It just depends on each individual person and we want to be able to assess this person versus this person versus this person, even though they all live in the same county or the same ZIP code, but they might not be getting those same resources.