Elbert Huang, MD, MPH, Instructor of Medicine, is a general internist with expertise in decision analytic modeling, meta-analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis recruited from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he received fellowship training in diabetes epidemiology and health services research under the mentorship of Drs. James Meigs and Daniel Singer. His area of expertise is cardiovascular risk factor modification in patients with diabetes, with special interests in older diabetic patients. In a recent article published in the American Journal of Medicine, Dr. Huang used meta-analytic techniques to quantify the cardiovascular benefits of treating hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetes mellitus. He found that for aggregate cardiac events, cholesterol lowering [rate ratio (RR) = 0.75; 95% CI: 0.61 to 0.93] and blood pressure lowering (RR=0.73; 95% CI: 0.57 to .94) produced larger, significant effects whereas intensive glucose lowering reduced events without reaching statistical significance (RR = 0.87; 95% CI: 0.74 to 1.01).

For patients over the age of 65, meeting these intensified prevention goals of diabetes, including the control of multiple risk factor levels, modification of diet, and intensification of exercise, may be especially difficult. Dr. Huang has received funding from the Hartford Center of Excellence in Geriatrics to elicit elderly diabetes patients’ barriers to meeting multiple preventive goals and to assess elderly diabetes patients’ priorities for strategies addressing different preventive goals. Describing the extent of perceived difficulties with taking medications and adhering to specific behavioral tasks will be important for clinicians and for researchers developing care improvement interventions. Dr. Huang is also planning to interview physicians to assess their perspectives on barriers and facilitators to meeting multiple preventive goals in patients with diabetes. Dr. Huang won the 2001 Midwest Society of General Internal Medicine Junior Faculty Research Award for an abstract analyzing differences in resource utilization and outcomes in patients treated at a diabetes clinic versus a general medicine clinic.