Exercise therapy

Dr Alison Kirk, who recently took up the post of Lecturer in Sports Biomedicine, has been awarded a structural education grant from Diabetes UK to develop and evaluate exercise therapy for people with Type 2 diabetes.

Alison will be working with the University's Dr Henning Wackerhage, Dr Daniel Cuthbertson, Dr Graham Leese and Brian Ewing to develop a patient education programme over the next few months.

Despite the well documented benefits of exercise, around 80% of people with Type 2 diabetes remain sedentary and more work needs to be done to promote physical activity to people with the disease. In accordance with current Diabetes UK care recommendations, the team has proposed to develop a structured patient education programme to promote and maintain long term physical activity in people with Type 2 Diabetes.

Alison said, "A more physically active diabetic population could potentially demonstrate a better management of diabetes, including improved glycaemic control, reduced likelihood of complications, reduced cardiovascular risk factors, improved quality of life and reduced drug dosage. These benefits may reduce the need for treatment."

The programme will involve an initial six week period of education and supervised exercise, with the education component including advice about how to avoid relapsing back to an inactive lifestyle and the exercise component involving individualised endurance and resistance activities. It will then be evaluated over a one year period to determine if it has been successful.