LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction
Diabetes is a silent disease as many diabetics become realize that they are having diabetes after showing at least one of the serious complications (Al Hussaini & Mustafa, 2015). Malaysia is one of the 21 countries and territories of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) Western Pacific (WP) region. According to IDF (2015), WP has recorded 153 million (9.3% of the total population) of diabetes cases among adults with the age of 20-79 years old and it will increase to 215 million cases involving 11.9% of the total population in the year of 2040. Diabetes cases continue rising every year globally. The same situation also faced by Malaysia. Prevalence of diabetes in Malaysia in year 1986 was 6.3% and increase
Nephropathy is the most common complication of diabetes in Malaysia. It is reported that there are 7.8% of diabetic having nephropathy as the complication (MOH, 2013). Most of the studies found that the participants know that kidney problem is a complication of diabetes (Al-Sarayra & Khalidi, 2012; Khan et. al., 2012). Retinopathy is the second diabetes complications in this country as reported by MOH (2013) with the prevalence of 6.7% in 2012. Other studies on diabetes knowledge shows that eye problems or blindness (Mohieldein et. al., 2011) are the most known diabetes complications. In 2012, 1.2% of diabetic suffers from diabetic foot ulcer and 0.9% has to undergone amputation (MOH, 2013). Public are aware of these complications as found in the study done by Fezeu et. al. (2010) with 73.6% of the participants answered diabetic foot as the diabetes complications. Total of 73.5% participants realized that decaying limbs that require surgical removal is also one of the diabetic complications (Wee et. al.,
This enables the public to gain extra knowledge and information about the disease. Researchers have listed different source of information in their study in which most of the participants gaining information from friends and relatives (Al-Sarayra & Khalidi, 2012; Khan et. al., 2012; Mohieldein et. al., 2011; Wee et. al., 2002).
Factors associated with the level of knowledge about diabetes Age of the participants shows a significant relationship with the level of knowledge regarding diabetes. This can be found in the previous studies which shows that age of the participants are influencing their level of knowledge about the disease. It is proven that the increasing age of participants showed that they are performing well in answering the questions about diabetes (Minhat & Hamedon, 2014; Mohd Nazri Mohd Najib et. al., 2014). It is unclear on how gender can influence the level of diabetes knowledge but there are studies done which shows that gender can be an important contributing factor towards diabetes understanding. Study done by Soltanian et. al. (2007) and Mohieldein et. al. (2011) found that males’ level of knowledge are much higher than females but in a study done by Khan et. al. (2012) stated that females have higher level of knowledge about diabetes when compared to