The Health Belief Model and Self-Care Behaviors among Type 2 Diabetic Patients

iabetes is the most common important metabolic disease. Due to its high prevalence, diabetes is considered as a health problem worldwide (1). Diabetes type 2 constitutes about 90 to 95 percent of diabetic patients and occurs most often in older than 40 years (2). This disease imposes great direct and indirect costs to health care systems (3). Major part of these costs is related to longterm complications of the disease, such as coronary heart diseases, stroke, blindness, lower limb amputation and kidney diseases (4). In 2010, about 285 million people worldwide were suffering from diabetes. Prevalence of diabetes will increase in future due to population growth, urbanization, the prevalence of obesity and sedentary lifestyle (1). According to studies (5,6) conducted in Iran 2% of the population are diabetics, and in people over 30 years is about 7.3 %. Considering the multiple chronic complications of diabetes, such as visual, D 1Department of Nursing, Hamadan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Hamadan, Iran. 2Assistant Professor of Health Education and Health Promotion, Social Determinants of Health Research Center, Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, Hamadan, Iran.