Knowledge, Attitude and Behavior of Adolescents towards Diabetes Mellitus

Abstract

The prevalence of Diabetes mellitus (DM) patients is steadily increasing year by year. Indonesia was the fifth highest number of diabetes patients in the world, right after China, India, United States of America, and Brazil. Today, adolescents’ life style tends to be less healthy as they prefer consuming fast foods and lack of exercise, which is feared to be the cause of Diabetes mellitus type 2. This research aimed to understand the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of adolescents towards Diabetes Mellitus. The subjects for this research were 81 students of a private university, aged 19 to 21 years old. The author used questionnaires for collecting the data. Further, the data were analyzed descriptively by employing percentage acquired from the data. The research results showed that some subjects (70,9%) had low knowledge of Diabetes Mellitus, 84% claimed that they maintained healthy behavior by consuming healthy diets in order to prevent getting infected with Diabetes mellitus, and 65% stated that they would try to seek for medical treatment if they were infected. However, the data also found that 77% of the total subjects tended to consume unhealthy diets and 52% of them rarely exercised. The acquired result showed that the subjects had not practiced healthy life style, especially in preventing Diabetes mellitus.