The Diabetes Prevention Program is a multicenter controlled clinical trial examining the efficacy of an intensive life-style intervention or metformin to prevent or delay the development of diabetes in a population selected to be at high risk due to the presence of impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Development of diabetes, defined by 1997 ADA criteria, is the primary outcome while cardiovascular disease and its risk factors are important secondary outcomes. The DPP began recruitment in mid-1996. At the time of this application, total study exposure is a mean of approximately 3 years (range 2 to 5) with a total of approximately 10,000 patient years in the 3,234 volunteers in the 3-arm study. On the basis of a statistically significant and clinically compelling decrease in the development of diabetes in the life-style intervention and metformin-treated groups (58% and 31% reductions, respectively) compared with the placebo treated group, the DPP Data Monitoring Board and NIDDK ended the masked treatment phase of the study in May, 2001, one year earlier than originally planned. This application is designed to take further advantage of the scientifically and clinically valuable cohort of DPP volunteers and the large volume of data collected during the study. The highly compliant DPP cohort, including 45% minorities, is the largest IGT population ever studied. Moreover, the subcohort that has developed diabetes (n approximately 700) has been followed from near the exact time of diabetes onset. Clinically important research questions remain in the wake of the DPP. The carefully collected, centrally measured and graded data in this cohort should help to answer, definitively, a number ofvolunteers with impaired glucose tolerance and volunteers whose diabetes developed during the DPP to determine the natural history of diabetic complications. This analysis will be epidemiologic in nature with all groups being pooled with prior treatment being used as a co-variate. Finally, the same data will be used to examine the effects of gender, age, and race/ethnicity on diabetes and its vascular complication.
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