Abstract
Objective: To verify the students’ perception about diabetes in public schools. Methods: Descriptive cross-sectional study, with students’ interview to access their diabetes knowledge (signs and symptoms, food, and diabetes self-care at school). Content analysis was used for the open question, expressed by number of occurrences, and frequencies, means and standard deviations for the other results. Results: 302 students, with 9,1±1,5 years and 54% female. For “what is diabetes” there were 91 occurrences associated with negative consequences. For 95.4% of interviewees, people with diabetes cannot eat sweets, and for 32.8% diabetes is transmitted from person to person. Only 34.8% stated that the classmate with diabetes can participate in physical/recreational activities; and 32.1% replied that he/she could not have a snack with the others. Only 29.2% of the interviewees recognized that the classmate with diabetes would need to have something with sugar to eat/drink in case he/she feel bad. Conclusions: These results reinforce the need for action of diabetes education to improve students' knowledge and perception about diabetes in the school, as well as better management for students with this condition at that environment.
Keywords:
Diabetes Mellitus; Students; Health Education; Health Knowledge; Attitudes; Practice
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