Our Students in Action

Alexis Alebastro

Janice Adelman

Kelly Neff:
Improving Life for Teens With Diabetes

PhD student Kelly Neff is working to help adolescents with diabetes obtain a better quality of life. In partnership with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), she is recruiting adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 with Type I diabetes to examine the psychosocial factors that predict medical treatment adherence. "We want to understand what allows these kids to follow their treatments. Adolescents with diabetes have to eat right, watch their sugar levels, and often inject insulin when they are around their friends. We think many factors of treatment adherence are influenced by the social environment and peer support."

Kelly will look at social and environmental factors like peer relationships, social support, desirability to be popular, and parental monitoring as well as physical measures of blood sugar levels. "A lot of these kids want to be adherent, so when you ask them about it, they may say they are following their treatment, but then their blood sugar levels do not reflect this. This is why it is important to obtain a physical measure." The research will combine this on-site measurement at CHOC with online tools that measure health status. Parental involvement in the study is also key to understanding adolescent behavior. "Parents are usually trying to make their kids adhere to treatment, and certain parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, or permissive) could have an effect."

Once the study is completed, the next stage of Kelly’s research will be to identify the strongest predictors of adherence and create an intervention program that can be used among children with type-1 diabetes, particularly for at-risk groups like minorities and young women. "With adolescent females, we often see a condition termed dia-bulimia where girls don’t take their medication because of the possibility of weight gain. This can lead to serious negative health consequences, and even death."

Kelly hopes that an intervention developed from research of this kind will be able to improve the lives of diabetic adolescents by increasing their self-esteem, raising their treatment self-efficacy and improving physical health. "For adolescents who discover they have diabetes, it’s often a shock and trauma to learn that they will have to monitor this disease for the rest of their lives." Ideally, she hopes the research will help develop an intervention that is both reliable and robust that can improve quality of life in adolescents who have Type I diabetes throughout the U.S. "Hopefully this study is a springboard to helping kids all over the country."

Marian Liu