MECHNER'S NOTATION USED AS A COMPARATIVE TOOL OF DIABETES SELF-MANAGEMENT ENHANCEMENT INTERVENTIONS

Elder population is becoming proportionally a larger segment of the total population and among their health problems, diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of their main causes of death and disability. In DM, self-management is the basis for a better control, which is why public policy makers and healthcare providers should have available analytic tools that allow them to discriminate among the best self-care interventions in diabetes for older patients. Even though there are several meta-analyses already that offer this kind of review, this article proposes the use of Mechner's behavioral contingencies language to compare different approaches. Three interventions were described with this notation and even though there were some limitations for this analysis due to the fact that some results were not comparable or not available in the original papers, this formal symbolic language demonstrated to be useful for making analytical comparisons visually accessible, providing a better understanding of the contingencies that are at play in the situation and giving the advantage of cutting across all natural languages.