Language may impact diabetes care for Latinos with limited English

Latino patients with limited English skills may be less likely to take prescribed diabetes medications than other diabetics in the US even when they see Spanish-speaking doctors, a recent study suggests. When researchers studied 31,000 patients with diabetes who received insurance and healthcare through Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, they found that about 60 percent of Spanish-speaking Latino patients skipped filling prescriptions at least 20 percent of the time in the two years after they were told they needed the drugs to help control the disease.