image: Dr. Deborah Young-Hyman, Professor of Pediatrics and a diabetes and obesity researcher at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University, is Co-Editor of Psychosocial Clinical Guidelines for the Treatment of Patients with Diabetes, the American Diabetes Association’s first reference text covering the major psychosocial issues of diabetes. view more
Credit: Phil Jones, Georgia Health Sciences University Photographer
AUGUSTA, Ga. – Dr. Deborah Young-Hyman, Professor of Pediatrics and a diabetes and obesity researcher at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University, is Co-Editor of the American Diabetes Association's first reference text covering the major psychosocial issues of diabetes.
Dr. Mark Peyrot, Professor of Sociology at Loyola College and a research faculty member at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, also is Co-Editor of Psychosocial Clinical Guidelines for the Treatment of Patients with Diabetes.
The comprehensive book gives practitioners guidelines to access and prescribe evidence-based treatment for psychosocial problems commonly associated with diabetes. Topics include adjustment to illness, adherence to treatment, depression, interpersonal relationships as well as ethics and safety.
"We wanted to put in the hands of clinicians and researchers the best information available about how living with diabetes affects not only the physical wellbeing of people but their total well-being across the lifespan," Young-Hyman said. "It can be a vicious cycle: having diabetes increases the risk of poor psychosocial outcomes such as depression and disordered eating behavior which can, in turn, adversely impact their diabetes treatment and disease outcome. Evidence-based strategies contained in this book provide guidelines for behavioral diabetes care and will help caregivers and their patients recognize and successfully cope with these significant issues in a chronic disease that is now pervasive in our society."
Young-Hyman chairs the ADA Behavioral Medicine Council's Psychosocial Clinical Guidelines Writing Committee and is a reviewer for the association's Book Division. She reviews abstracts for the ADA's scientific sessions and is a member of its Research Grant Review Panel and an American Association of Diabetes Educators-certified educator. She is a 30-year member of the ADA's Professional Section: Behavioral Medicine and Psychology. Young-Hyman served on the American Association of Diabetes Educators 2010 Expert Panel on Monitoring in Diabetes Management. In 2011, she chaired a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Review Panel reviewing funding requests for community-based childhood obesity research. She is a Fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and The Obesity Society.
Young-Hyman researches obesity and related metabolic disorders from infancy to adulthood. She also studies the interplay between psychosocial and physiologic factors effecting chronic disease outcomes – development of obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and cardiovascular risk. Her studies have helped elucidate the conundrum of how type 1 diabetes treatment can increase hunger in patients struggling to maintain a healthy weight and how the disease can produce a preoccupation with food. She has more than two decades of experience in the family-based treatment of psychosocial issues related to acute and chronic illness with a specialty in diabetes.