Prevention of type 2 diabetes by digital lifestyle management

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a major threat to human health worldwide.

Despite the enormous potential in addressing the root cause of the problem by early lifestyle intervention, which counteracts disease progression, high-risk individuals rarely receive structured lifestyle support.A major reason is that prevention programs require large resources. Clinical guidelines therefore emphasize the need for new scalable prevention such as digital tools.

There are however severe knowledge gaps on long-term data from randomized trials and cost-effectiveness.To address the large need for more effective prevention, we have developed a person-centred digital intervention with healthcare and end users.

It improves blood glucose over several years in patients with manifest T2D and is cost-saving, making it highly warranted to investigate if it can also prevent disease onset in high-risk individuals.We will perform a nationwide study where individuals >35-years are screened for T2D risk and randomly assigned to the intervention or to a control group.

The primary outcome is the incidence of T2D during three years.The project goes considerably beyond previous research by the new scalable intervention, the large study size with both rigorous incidence measures and pioneering analyses of pathophysiological subgroups, and the seamless implementation in healthcare during the study.

If the outcome is positive the results will therefore have vast impact for patients, healthcare and society at large.