How is neighborhood social disorganization associated with diabetes outcomes? A multilevel investigation of glycemic control and self-reported use of acute or emergency health care services.

Background: Diabetes management is influenced by a number of factors beyond the individual-level. This study examined how neighborhood social disorganization (i.e., neighborhoods characterized by high economic disadvantage, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity), is associated with diabetes-related outcomes.

Methods: We used a multilevel modeling approach to investigate the associations between census-tract neighborhood social disorganization, A1c, and self-reported use of acute or emergency health care services for a sample of 424 adults with type 2 diabetes.

Results: Individuals living in neighborhoods with high social disorganization had higher A1c values than individuals living in neighborhoods with medium social disorganization (B = 0.39, p  = 0.01). Individuals living in neighborhoods with high economic disadvantage had higher self-reported use of acute or emergency health care services than individuals living in neighborhoods with medium economic disadvantage (B = 0.60, p  = 0.02).

Conclusions: High neighborhood social disorganization was associated with higher A1c values and high neighborhood economic disadvantage was associated with greater self-reported use of acute or emergency health care services. Controlling for individual level variables diminished this effect for A1c, but not acute or emergency health care use. Comprehensive approaches to diabetes management should include attention to neighborhood context. Failure to do so may help explain the continuing disproportionate diabetes burden in many neighborhoods despite decades of attention to individual-level clinical care and education.

Trial registration: For this study, we used baseline data from a larger study investigating the impacts on patient-centered outcomes of three different approaches to self-monitoring of blood glucose among 450 adults with non-insulin dependent type 2 diabetes living in North Carolina. This study was registered as a clinical trial on 1/7/2014 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02033499).