This year, the NIDDK’s Diabetes Discoveries and Practice Blog published more than 30 posts in collaboration with health care professionals on a wide range of topics, from social determinants of health and interpreting A1C results, to stress management and disaster planning. Several video interviews can also be found in the Diabetes for Health Professionals YouTube playlist. Below we’re highlighting some of the most popular posts of the year, along with three posts of interest you may have missed.

Most Popular Posts of 2020:

1. New Technologies in Diabetes Care and Management
   Learn about three NIH-funded research groups who are developing innovative technologies that may change the way health care professionals understand, diagnose, and treat type 1 and type 2 diabetes —including a noninvasive device to measure blood glucose and a wearable ultrasound patch to measure blood pressure.
   
   
2. Interpreting A1C: Diabetes and Hemoglobin Variants
   What do health care professionals need to know about factors that can interfere with A1C test results? In the Interpreting A1C blog series, Randie R. Little, PhD, discusses how hemoglobin variants can give falsely high or low readings with A1C testing methods, and how this can lead to the over-treatment or under-treatment of diabetes.
   
   
3. Teens, Genes, and Food Choices: What Contributes to Adolescent Obesity?
   As a nurse, family nurse practitioner, and investigative researcher for the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Paule V. Joseph has worked extensively with individuals who have diabetes and obesity. In this post, she talks about the rise of obesity in adolescents, the diabetes-related health implications, and what we can do to reduce young people’s risk for obesity.

Three Interesting Posts You May Have Missed:

1. The Social Determinants of Health and Diabetes
   In the series on the social determinants of health, clinical psychologist and behavioral scientist Felicia Hill-Briggs, PhD, discusses how unequal distribution of social resources, or social determinants, can lead to disproportionately negative health outcomes, and what can be done to address such inequities.
   
   
2. The Importance of Managing Stress for Diabetes Health Care Professionals
   Krystal M. Lewis, PhD, a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and a licensed clinical psychologist, explains how stress affects the body and shares ideas for how health care professionals can manage the stress they experience in their professional and personal lives to prevent it from adversely affecting work performance, emotional wellbeing, and health.
   
   
3. Diabetes Makes Disaster Planning Even More Important
   Staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic has involved a set of responses including shelter in place, quarantine, wearing protective gear such as face coverings, and social distancing. Other kinds of disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes, require an entirely different set of responses. In this post, Jeffrey B. Kopp, MD, chief of the NIDDK Kidney Diseases Section, discusses the role of health care professionals in helping their patients plan for disaster and know what to do when a disaster is imminent or has occurred. For more information on this topic, you can also read a second blog post about disaster planning for people with kidney disease or watch an interview where Dr. Kopp speaks about preparing for and managing dialysis treatment during natural disasters.

What content did you enjoy most from the blog over the past year? What would you like to see more of in 2021? Let us know in the comments below.