Diabetic Foot and Self-awareness of This Entity

Aims: To determine the relationship between the diabetic foot stages and the self-awareness about self-care of the feet in patients attending first level medical facility.

Study Design: This is a descriptive, cross sectional study.

Place and Duration of Study: This study was conducted in Unit Number 57 of the Family Medicine in the Mexican Institute of Social Security in Puebla, Mexico between January and June of 2017.

Methodology: We included 360 patients whom we surveyed to correlate between the level of knowledge about self-care of the feet in diabetic patients and its stages. We used a questionnaire in which the variables included gender, age, level of education, occupation, marital status, number of years since they were diagnosed with diabetes mellitus type 2, stage of the diabetic foot and level of knowledge related to this entity. Descriptive statistics and X2 were used.

Results: We included 360 patients who met the inclusion criteria. Their average age was 55.75 years, the average number of years with the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus was 6.07. There was a significant statistic association between the level of knowledge and the stage of the diabetic foot P = .049 a value of P= .05 was considered statistically significant.

Conclusion: There is an association between the stage of the diabetic foot and the knowledge about the self-care of the feet among patients.