INCREASING THE NUMBERS OF PARTICIPANTS

We expect a key issue with any centre(s) that might be interested in adopting this approach to be – are they likely to be able to recruit at least 52 subjects in their centre and run small group lessons for them? In this respect it should be stressed that while some considerable thought has gone into the protocol [5], this is not written in ‘tablets of stone’. Therefore if there are some changes to the protocol that a particular centre thinks might help locally, they should please feel free to suggest / incorporate them.

Also, as will be self-evident, AIDA is primarily intended for simulation of example insulin-dependent (type 1) diabetic patients (it does not, at present, incorporate any functions for endogenous insulin secretion). Having said that a fair number of insulin-treated patients with non-insulin-dependent (type 2) diabetes have reported finding AIDA of use. In this respect it seems that many of the processes involved in balancing insulin and diet in diabetes are quite similar in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Therefore if there might be problems with recruiting 52 type 1 subjects in a particular centre, an alternative that would also be of interest (and which has not yet been tried) would be to focus on seeing if AIDA can help in the education of insulin-treated patients with type 2 diabetes.

Finally, if running such a study (teaching 52 patients in a single centre) is likely to be too much work, another alternative would be to aim to recruit a more manageable number of subjects (say 24) in each individual centre – but increase the numbers (and power of the study) by pooling data between 2 or 3 separate centres. Provided the same protocol has been applied in each centre, and provided that patients are randomised separately within each centre (so there are equal numbers of control and AIDA subjects in each centre), this approach should be perfectly feasible. Certainly such a multi-centre approach is planned to start in Autumn (Fall) 2001 in Italy, with none of the individual centres on current plans being expected to recruit and teach more than 24 patients.

If you are interested in implementing this protocol and running such a study in your centre – but have any concerns over the numbers of subjects – please do get in touch via the contact form. We would be keen to try and find a way round any ‘problems’. We could either try and put you in touch with one or two other like-minded centres, or if you were interested we could try and co-ordinate some sort of larger scale multi-centre study, where data from different centres are pooled. It is really a case of what you might prefer. Obviously if you have any diabetes centres local to you which could help out, and boost the numbers of participants in this way, that would be ideal.

Next Page

B A N N E R . E X C H A N G E . A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Why we are displaying banners at the AIDA Website?

---

Return to Top of Page

If you like AIDA, why not display our logo on your home page? For more information about linking to the AIDA Website please click here.

---

Return to AIDA Website Home Page

AIDA is a freeware diabetes software simulator program of glucose-insulin action + insulin dose & diet adjustment in diabetes mellitus. It is intended purely for education, self-learning and / or teaching use. It is not meant for individual blood glucose prediction or therapy planning. Caveats

---

This Web page was last updated on 31st December, 2000.

(c) www.2aida.org, 2000. All rights reserved. Disclaimer. For the AIDA US Mirror Site, please click here. For the Diabetes / Insulin Tutorial, please click here.