PROJECT SUMMARY
T2D is a major public health problem and is currently the 7th leading cause of death in the US. Despite a range
of efficacious treatments, less than 50% of patients achieve a glycemic target of A1c < 7.0%, suggesting that this
is due to difficulty with following medical regimens to reduce A1C levels. While a range of factors have been
identified in this regard, we posit that a barrier to treatment are broad difficulty with emotional regulation that are
not diagnosis-specific but lead to Diabetes Distress (DD) and difficulty in coping with medical regimens, and
other aspects of diabetes self-care, in the context of the psychosocial stressors associated with T2D. Extant data
suggests that sub-optimal emotional regulation (experience of intense emotion and skill at regulating emotion)
is related to elevated DD and A1c levels, and that an Emotion-Focused Behavioral Intervention (EFBI) can reduce
both DD and A1c levels in PWD with T2D. In this project we seek to, first, adapt our EFBI, initially developed as
a one-to-one intervention, to a group intervention (G-EFBI) and, two, collect feasibility, acceptability, and
preliminary efficacy data to determine if G-EFBI is a feasible, acceptable and, possibly, efficacious intervention
compared to an “Attentional Control” intervention in PWD with T2D and elevated DD and A1c levels.
