The study was led by Majed M. Aljabri, Alya Alghamdi, and Bandar S. Alharbi, researchers in the Community and Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing Department at the College of Nursing, King Saud University in Riyadh. The team recruited 413 adults with diabetes who were attending primary healthcare centers in the Saudi capital. Roughly one-third of the participants — 31.0 percent — had lived with diabetes for more than a decade, and just over a quarter, 26.9 percent, reported experiencing diabetes-related complications, a reminder that the cohort included many people for whom the stakes of good self-care were already painfully concrete. Ethical approval was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee of King Saud University, and the study was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent from all participants.

To capture the psychological dimensions of the problem, the researchers deployed three well-established instruments. The 18-item Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale, or MHLC, breaks health-related beliefs into distinct components: Internal Health Locus of Control, reflecting confidence in one’s own agency; Powerful Others Health Locus of Control, reflecting reliance on healthcare professionals and other authority figures; and Chance or Fate Health Locus of Control, reflecting the sense that health outcomes are determined by luck or destiny. Illness perceptions were measured with the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire, which probes how patients understand their condition — its consequences, its timeline, its controllability, and the emotional weight it carries. Self-care behavior was assessed with the Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities, a validated measure covering domains such as diet, exercise, blood glucose testing, foot care, and medication adherence.

The analytical strategy unfolded in two stages, each answering a different question. First, the team used multivariable linear regression to ask whether each locus-of-control dimension was associated with diabetes self-care after statistically adjusting for sociodemographic and clinical characteristics — a crucial step, because raw correlations between beliefs and behavior can easily be distorted by age, education, disease duration, or the presence of complications. Second, the researchers turned to structural equation modeling, a statistical framework that allows investigators to test hypothesized pathways linking variables simultaneously, including indirect effects that pass through an intermediate variable. Here, the intermediate variable was positive illness perception, and the question was whether locus of control influences self-care directly, or whether it works by first shaping how patients mentally frame their disease.

The regression results were striking in their asymmetry. Internal Health Locus of Control showed a positive association with diabetes self-care, with a standardized coefficient of 0.29 and a 95 percent confidence interval running from 0.11 to 0.47. Powerful Others Health Locus of Control was nearly identical in magnitude, with a coefficient of 0.28 and a confidence interval of 0.09 to 0.47. In plain terms, people who believed they controlled their own health, and people who trusted the power of their healthcare providers, both tended to report better self-care. The Chance and Fate dimension, by contrast, showed no significant direct association with self-care at all — a finding that might seem to suggest fatalism is irrelevant to diabetes management, until the structural equation modeling revealed otherwise.

That second stage of analysis is where the study becomes genuinely illuminating. Internal Health Locus of Control was strongly and positively associated with positive illness perceptions, with a coefficient of 0.620 and a p-value below 0.001. Positive illness perceptions, in turn, were strongly associated with better diabetes self-care, with a coefficient of 0.506, again at p below 0.001. When the researchers traced the indirect pathway — from internal control beliefs, through more constructive perceptions of the illness, to self-care behavior — the indirect effect was 0.314, with a confidence interval of 0.126 to 0.502 that excluded zero. In other words, a substantial share of the relationship between believing in one’s own agency and actually practicing good self-care appears to run through the way patients conceptualize their disease: how controllable they judge it to be, how serious they consider its consequences, and how coherent their understanding of it feels.

Perhaps the most unexpected result concerned the Chance and Fate dimension. Although fatalistic beliefs showed no direct link to self-care in the regression models, the structural equation model detected a significant indirect association: the pathway from Chance Health Locus of Control through positive illness perceptions to self-care carried a coefficient of 0.113, with a confidence interval of 0.025 to 0.201. This suggests that the relationship between fatalism and diabetes behavior is more nuanced than a simple negative correlation. The authors concluded that Internal and Chance dimensions of health locus of control are associated with self-care primarily through their relationships with illness perceptions, whereas the Powerful Others dimension showed a direct association with self-care behavior — implying that trust in clinicians may motivate action more immediately, without needing to first reshape how the patient views the disease.

The clinical implications of this pathway analysis are considerable. Diabetes self-care is the foundation of glycemic control and the primary defense against the long-term complications that make diabetes one of the world’s most burdensome chronic diseases — retinopathy, nephropathy, neuropathy, and cardiovascular disease among them. Yet self-care is notoriously difficult to change through education alone. If the Saudi findings generalize, interventions that target illness perceptions — for example, helping patients develop a more coherent and controllable mental model of their diabetes — could unlock self-care improvements that information-only programs fail to achieve. The results also hint that different patients may need different psychological levers: those with strong internal control beliefs might benefit most from perception-focused work, while those who defer heavily to their doctors may respond well to structured clinical support and clear, actionable guidance from trusted providers.

The study’s context matters as well. Saudi Arabia faces a substantial and growing diabetes burden, and primary healthcare centers in Riyadh serve a diverse population in which cultural and religious framings of health and destiny can shape how illness is understood. The cross-sectional design, however, imposes an important limitation: because beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors were all measured at a single point in time, the analysis cannot prove that locus of control causes illness perceptions, or that illness perceptions cause self-care. Reverse pathways — in which successful self-management fosters a stronger sense of control, for instance — remain plausible, and longitudinal or interventional studies will be needed to establish directionality. The authors also relied on self-report instruments, which are vulnerable to social desirability and recall bias, although all three scales are widely validated in diabetes research.

Even with those caveats, the research adds a compelling piece to the psychology of chronic disease management. It suggests that the mind’s model of an illness is not merely a passive reflection of medical facts but an active mechanism that converts belief into behavior. For the 413 adults in Riyadh who participated, and for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide living with diabetes, the message is that how you think about your disease — whether you see it as manageable, coherent, and within your influence — may matter almost as much as the medications in your cabinet. And for the clinicians treating them, the study argues that listening to how patients perceive their illness could be as clinically productive as prescribing the next dose.

Subject of Research: Health locus of control, illness perceptions, and diabetes self-care among adults with diabetes in Saudi Arabia

Article Title: Associations of health locus of control with diabetes self-care: the role of illness perceptions among adults with diabetes in Saudi Arabia

Article References: Aljabri, M. M., Alghamdi, A., & Alharbi, B. S. (2026). Associations of health locus of control with diabetes self-care: the role of illness perceptions among adults with diabetes in Saudi Arabia. BMC Endocrine Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12902-026-02567-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12902-026-02567-6

Keywords: diabetes, health locus of control, illness perceptions, diabetes self-care, self-management, health psychology, structural equation modeling, Saudi Arabia, primary health care, chronic disease, patient behavior, endocrinology

The selection process behind these awards is grounded in the journal’s internal editorial governance rather than external popular vote. Nominated and eligible articles published in the prior year in JNEB are evaluated by members of the Journal Committee and the JNEB Board of Editors, who judge the outstanding contributions in each category. Lead authors of the winning and finalist works receive a monetary award, and the recognized articles are featured on the journal’s website, giving the winning research a prominent platform beyond its original publication. This structure is designed to reward both scientific excellence and practical utility in a field that sits at the intersection of behavioral science, public health, and education.

In the flagship Best Article category, the top honor went to a team led by Caitlyn B. Faul, MPH, RD, LDN, CDCES, together with Stephanie Jilcott Pitts, Eric E. Calloway, Hilary K. Seligman, Heidi Reis, Cheryl Webb Cherry, Irene E. Hatsu, Oyinlola Toyin Babatunde, Alexandra L. MacMillan Uribe, Jared T. McGuirt, and Rebecca A. Seguin-Fowler. Their winning article, titled A Meta-Ethnography to Determine Critical Constructs of Nutrition Security, tackles one of the most consequential conceptual shifts in contemporary nutrition policy: the move from measuring food security alone toward a fuller understanding of nutrition security. Meta-ethnography is a rigorous qualitative synthesis method that interprets findings across multiple qualitative studies, and by applying it to this domain the authors aimed to identify the critical constructs that define what it means for households and individuals to be nutritionally, not merely calorically, secure.

The significance of that work reflects a broader reorientation in American food policy discourse. Where food security has traditionally been assessed by access to sufficient calories, nutrition security emphasizes the consistent availability of foods and beverages that promote well-being and prevent diet-related chronic disease. A meta-ethnographic approach is technically demanding because it requires researchers to translate concepts across studies conducted in different settings with different populations, preserving the interpretive richness of the original qualitative work while producing a coherent synthesis. The award committee’s decision to recognize this article signals the field’s growing interest in frameworks that can guide practitioners and policymakers as they design programs intended to improve dietary quality rather than simply alleviate hunger.

The Best Article Finalist Award was presented to a large collaborative team whose article examined a policy question with immediate relevance to millions of American schoolchildren. Juliana F.W. Cohen, ScD, RD, along with Monica D. Zuercher, Dania Orta-Aleman, Leah E. Chapman, Christina A. Hecht, Kenneth Hecht, Punam Ohri-Vachaspati, Deborah A. Olarte, Anisha I. Patel, Michele Polacsek, Marlene B. Schwartz, Lorrene D. Ritchie, and Wendi Gosliner, were honored for their article Impact of Deimplementing Universal Free School Meals: School Food Authority Perspectives. Deimplementation, the deliberate process of discontinuing an established practice, is an emerging focus in implementation science, and universal free school meals have been among the most widely debated nutrition policies of recent years. By gathering the perspectives of school food authorities, the entities responsible for operating school meal programs, the study captures the operational and practical consequences experienced on the ground when such programs are scaled back.

In the Best Research Brief category, the winning work came from a team led by Eliza Short, PhD, RDN, joined by Ji Li, James P. Selig, Kelsey Bounds, Brett Rowland, Bonnie Faitak, Jazmin Lane, Rosana Solis-Garcia, Holly C. Felix, Krista Langston, Pearl A. McElfish, Juan Mejia-Otera, Lauren Haggard-Duff, and Christopher R. Long. Their article, Medically Tailored Grocery Delivery for Food Pantry Clients with Diabetes, investigates an intervention model that sits at the frontier of food-is-medicine approaches. Medically tailored grocery programs adapt the foods delivered to clients to align with their clinical conditions, in this case diabetes, and deliver them through food pantry channels that already serve people experiencing food insecurity. Research briefs are a distinct article format in JNEB, designed to communicate focused studies concisely, and the recognition of this work highlights how compact study designs can illuminate interventions with direct clinical and programmatic implications.

The Best Research Brief Finalist Award went to Samantha M. Sundermeir, PhD, MS, RDN, and colleagues Mika Matsuzaki, Angela Zhang, Jane C. Obi, Joel Gittelsohn, and Megan R. Winkler for their article Characterizing the Consumer Food Environment of Dollar Stores and Exploring Differences by Neighborhood Racial Composition. Dollar stores have expanded rapidly across the United States and have become a significant source of groceries for many communities, particularly in rural areas and neighborhoods underserved by traditional supermarkets. Systematically characterizing the consumer food environment, the range, price, and quality of foods available to shoppers, within these stores, and then examining how those environments differ according to the racial composition of surrounding neighborhoods, addresses an important equity question in food access research. The study exemplifies the kind of environmental assessment work that underpins effective nutrition education and policy interventions.

The GEM category, dedicated to Great Educational Material, produced its own winner and finalist. The Best GEM Award was presented to Rebecca Brody, PhD, RD, LD, CNSC, Anca Cunningham, MS, RD, and Jason Stevens, DCN, RDN, for their article Prairietown Regional Medical Center: An AI-Driven Simulation for Teaching Leadership and Change Management to Nutrition Graduate Students. This work represents a notable convergence of nutrition education and emerging technology, using an artificial intelligence-driven simulation to immerse graduate students in realistic leadership scenarios. Change management, the structured approach to guiding organizations through transitions, is a competency that dietetics and nutrition professionals increasingly need as they lead program reforms in clinical and community settings, and simulation-based learning offers a low-risk environment in which students can practice these skills before applying them in professional practice.

The Best GEM Finalist Award recognized Jennifer A. Garner, PhD, RD, and coauthors Jennifer C. Shrodes, Katharine Garrity, Songzhu Zhao, Emmanuella Aboagye-Mensah, Amaris Williams, Guy Brock, Jennifer Hefner, Daniel M. Walker, and Joshua J. Joseph for Cooking Matters for Diabetes: A Curriculum to Support Diabetes Self-Management Among Individuals Facing Food Insecurity. Curricula of this kind translate behavioral nutrition science into structured, teachable programs, combining cooking skills with diabetes self-management education for populations where food insecurity complicates disease management. The dual recognition of this curriculum and the AI-driven simulation in the same category illustrates the breadth of educational innovation the GEM award is intended to celebrate, spanning community-based cooking education and technology-enhanced graduate training.

Congratulating the recipients, JNEB Editor-in-Chief Lauren Haldeman, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, said that the research recognized through these awards demonstrates the innovation, rigor, and dedication of the authors. As nutrition education continues to evolve to meet new challenges and opportunities, she noted, the evidence produced by these researchers is helping educators, practitioners, and communities make informed decisions that improve health outcomes, adding that the journal is proud to celebrate their contributions to the field. Taken together, the 2026 award portfolio paints a picture of a discipline actively grappling with the most pressing questions in food and health: how to define and measure nutrition security, how to manage the consequences of major school meal policy shifts, how food retail environments shape dietary equity, how food-is-medicine interventions can serve people managing chronic disease, and how the next generation of nutrition professionals can be trained with the aid of new technologies. The recognized articles are featured on the journal’s awards page, where readers can explore the full body of honored work.

Subject of Research: 2026 Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior awards recognizing outstanding nutrition education and behavior research and educational materials

Article Title: Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior announces 2026 Best Article, Best Research Brief, and GEM awards

Article References: Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior announces 2026 Best Article, Best Research Brief, and GEM awards. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, nutrition education, nutrition security, universal free school meals, food insecurity, medically tailored groceries, dollar stores, diabetes self-management, AI simulation, Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, research awards, Elsevier

The researchers set out to examine the relationship between parental health literacy and caregiver burden among parents of children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus, an autoimmune condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin. Unlike type 2 diabetes, type 1 typically appears in childhood and demands continuous self-management, which in practice means family management. Every meal, every bout of exercise, every illness, and every night of sleep is punctuated by decisions that depend on interpreting numbers and acting on them correctly.

Health literacy, in the technical sense used by the researchers, refers to a person’s capacity to access, understand, evaluate, and apply health-related information. For parents of children with type 1 diabetes, this skill set is exercised constantly: reading nutrition labels, interpreting glucose meter readings and continuous glucose monitor trends, calculating insulin doses, recognizing the early signs of hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia, and communicating with a rotating cast of pediatric endocrinologists, nurses, and dietitians. The study’s central hypothesis was that parents with stronger health literacy would experience less caregiver burden, plausibly because they feel more competent and less anxious in managing the disease.

To test this, the team conducted a descriptive and cross-sectional study with 156 parents of children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling between January and May 2025, using an online questionnaire distributed via social media platforms and online communication applications to reach eligible parents. The study was reported in accordance with the STROBE guidelines, the international standard for transparent reporting of observational research, and received ethics approval from the Yalova University Health Sciences Non-Interventional Clinical Research Ethics Committee.

Three instruments formed the backbone of the data collection. An information form captured demographic and clinical characteristics of the parents and children. The Health Literacy Scale–Short Form measured the parents’ ability to engage with health information. The Zarit Burden Interview, one of the most widely used instruments in caregiving research, quantified the subjective load that caregivers experience across domains such as physical health, emotional well-being, social life, and finances. Together, these tools allowed the researchers to test whether literacy and burden moved in opposite directions, as they predicted.

The sample sketched a familiar portrait of pediatric type 1 diabetes caregiving. Mothers made up 67.3 percent of the participants and fathers 32.7 percent, reflecting the persistent pattern in which mothers absorb the largest share of chronic disease management at home. Most of the children, 61.5 percent, were between 7 and 12 years old, an age span that spans the transition from supervised primary-school years to the early stirrings of adolescent independence. The average time since diagnosis was 3.96 years, with a standard deviation of 2.85, meaning the families had lived with the disease for a wide range of durations, from newly diagnosed to nearly a decade of daily management.

The headline numbers told a clear story. Parents scored a mean of 38.85 on the health literacy scale, with a standard deviation of 7.81, and a mean caregiver burden score of 32.83, with a standard deviation of 12.17. Statistical analysis revealed a negative and statistically significant correlation between the two measures: as parental health literacy rose, caregiver burden fell. The correlation coefficient was modest at r = -0.162, with a p-value of 0.013, meaning the relationship was unlikely to be a fluke of sampling but was also far from the whole explanation.

Before running their multiple linear regression, the researchers performed an outlier analysis to satisfy the assumptions of the model, a methodological step that helps prevent a handful of extreme respondents from distorting the results. The regression then painted a more nuanced picture than the simple correlation. Four variables emerged as significantly associated with caregiver burden: parent age, child age, health literacy, and household income status. Together, the model explained 25.9 percent of the total variance in burden scores, a figure that underscores just how multidimensional caregiver strain really is. Notably, the strongest single predictor was the child’s age, with a standardized beta coefficient of 0.437, suggesting that the developmental stage of the child weighs on parents more heavily than any other measured factor.

Why would a child’s age loom so large? The study’s data cannot answer that question directly, but the pattern is consistent with what clinicians observe in practice. School-age children face changing routines, unpredictable activity levels, and growing autonomy over food choices, all of which complicate glucose management. As children approach adolescence, the handover of responsibility from parent to child introduces its own anxieties, since developmental readiness to self-manage diabetes rarely arrives on a fixed schedule. The finding that income status also contributed to burden aligns with the well-documented financial strain of diabetes supplies, technology, and dietary demands, which families with fewer resources feel most acutely.

The authors are careful about the limits of their results. The association between health literacy and burden, while statistically significant, was modest in magnitude, and the cross-sectional design means the study captures a single moment in time rather than tracking how literacy and burden evolve together. Convenience sampling through online channels may also have reached parents who are more digitally connected and potentially more health-literate than the broader population of caregivers. The regression model, for all its significant predictors, still left roughly three quarters of the variance in burden unexplained, a reminder that factors outside this analysis, from marital dynamics to social support to the child’s glycemic control, likely shape the experience of caregiving as well.

Even so, the findings carry a practical message for pediatric nursing and diabetes care teams. If a parent’s ability to access, understand, evaluate, and apply health information is linked to how heavily the caregiving load sits on their shoulders, then education is not just about better glucose numbers; it may also be a form of psychological support. The authors suggest that future studies should evaluate whether nurse-led education and counseling programs targeting these health literacy skills are associated with improved caregiver outcomes. In a condition where families perform the bulk of medical care at home, every investment in making parents more confident readers of their child’s disease may pay a double dividend: sharper daily management and a lighter emotional load for the people carrying it.

Subject of Research: The relationship between parental health literacy and caregiver burden in parents of children with type 1 diabetes mellitus

Article Title: Parental healthliteracy as a predictor of caregiver burden among parents of children with type1 diabetes mellitus: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Yeşi̇l, F., & Avçi̇n, E. (2026). Parental healthliteracy as a predictor of caregiver burden among parents of children with type1 diabetes mellitus: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05319-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05319-y

Keywords: health literacy, caregiver burden, type 1 diabetes, pediatric nursing, parents, Zarit Burden Interview, cross-sectional study, child age, income status, diabetes self-management, nurse-led education, Parental

The research, led by Leila Mardanian Dehkordi of the Nursing and Midwifery Care Research Center at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, together with Mohammadreza Razeghi, Alireza Razeghi, and Samereh Abdoli of the University of Tennessee, examined the relationship between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management in adults with type 1 diabetes. While social support has been studied extensively in diabetes care, the investigators focused on a related but distinct construct: sense of belonging, defined as the subjective experience of being accepted, valued, and connected to others. It is not simply about how many people are around you, but whether you feel genuinely embraced by them.

To capture that experience, the team recruited 205 adults with type 1 diabetes through multistage cluster sampling from community healthcare centers in Isfahan, Iran. Participants completed two validated instruments: the Sense of Belonging Instrument, known as the SOBI, and the Diabetes Self-Management Questionnaire–Revised, or DSMQ-R. The SOBI distinguishes between two complementary dimensions. The first, SOBI-P, measures the psychological experience of belonging—the felt sense of acceptance and value. The second, SOBI-A, measures what researchers call antecedents of belonging: the concrete circumstances, such as social fit and shared characteristics with others, that make that psychological experience possible in the first place.

The DSMQ-R, meanwhile, breaks diabetes self-management into clinically meaningful domains: glucose management and monitoring, dietary control, physical activity, contact with physicians, and an overall self-management score. By pairing these two instruments, the researchers could ask a precise question: does feeling connected to others track with doing a better job of managing a demanding chronic illness?

The answer, on several fronts, was yes. Participants who reported a greater sense of belonging also reported better overall diabetes self-management. When the researchers unpacked the two dimensions of belonging separately, an interesting pattern emerged. The psychological experience of belonging—SOBI-P—was positively associated with glucose management and monitoring, dietary control, physician contact, and the overall self-management score. In other words, people who felt accepted and valued were more likely to check their sugars, watch their diets, and keep up with their doctors.

The antecedent dimension, SOBI-A, told a complementary story. It was associated with dietary control, physical activity, and overall self-management. This suggests that the concrete social conditions that enable belonging—having people around you with whom you share experiences and feel at ease—may translate into behavioral engagement, particularly in the domains of eating well and staying active. Both dimensions of belonging remained significantly associated with overall diabetes self-management in multiple regression analyses, indicating that the relationship held when accounting for other variables in the model.

Importantly, the researchers are careful about what the study does and does not show. The effect sizes they observed were modest, and because the design was cross-sectional—capturing a single moment in time—it cannot establish whether belonging drives better self-management, whether people who manage their diabetes well come to feel more connected, or whether both are shaped by some third factor such as depression, socioeconomic stability, or general health. Nor did the study find a significant association between either dimension of belonging and self-reported HbA1c, the laboratory measure of average blood sugar over the preceding months. Self-management behaviors and glycemic outcomes are related but not identical, and the path from feeling connected to lower HbA1c is clearly not a straight line.

Still, the theoretical grounding of the study gives the findings plausibility. Sense of belonging is a core element of self-determination theory, one of the most influential frameworks in motivational psychology, which holds that human beings have fundamental needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When the relatedness need is met, people are more internally motivated to pursue goals—including health goals. Living with type 1 diabetes, moreover, is often an isolating experience. Many adults describe hiding their condition, skipping insulin doses in social settings, or feeling misunderstood by friends and family who underestimate the disease’s demands. In that light, a felt sense of belonging could plausibly lower the emotional friction of daily self-care, making it easier to test glucose in public, ask for accommodations, or admit to a doctor that a regimen is slipping.

The clinical implications, though preliminary, are tangible. The authors suggest that strategies fostering belonging and meaningful social connections may complement existing diabetes self-management education and support programs. That could mean structured peer support groups, community-based programs for people with type 1 diabetes, or clinical workflows that screen for social isolation alongside HbA1c. It also resonates with a broader shift in chronic disease care toward recognizing psychosocial factors—loneliness, belonging, social integration—as legitimate targets of intervention rather than soft background variables. If the experience of being accepted and valued measurably tracks with the grit of daily diabetes work, then belonging is not a luxury; it is part of the treatment environment.

The study also carries a caution for how the field interprets such findings. Modest correlations in a single community sample of 205 adults in one Iranian city do not settle the question of causation, and self-reported self-management is an imperfect window into actual behavior. Future longitudinal and intervention studies will be needed to test whether deliberately cultivating belonging—through peer mentoring, group clinics, or community engagement—produces durable improvements in self-management and, ultimately, in glycemic control. Yet even with those caveats, the message is compelling in its simplicity: the drive to belong, so often treated as separate from medicine, may be quietly woven into the hardest work patients do every day. For adults carrying the constant cognitive load of type 1 diabetes, feeling seen and valued by others may be one of the quiet resources that keeps the counting, the injecting, and the monitoring going. Science is only beginning to measure how much that invisible connection matters—and this study suggests it matters more than we might think.

Subject of Research: The correlation between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management in adults with type 1 diabetes

Article Title: Correlation between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management among adults with type 1 diabetes

Article References: Mardanian Dehkordi, L., Razeghi, M., Razeghi, A., & Abdoli, S. (2026). Correlation between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management among adults with type 1 diabetes. BMC Endocrine Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12902-026-02581-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12902-026-02581-8

Keywords: type 1 diabetes, diabetes self-management, sense of belonging, social connectedness, psychosocial factors, BMC Endocrine Disorders, glucose monitoring, self-determination theory, HbA1c, peer support, chronic disease care, Iran