Endocrine Abstracts

Adrenal crisis is a life-threatening complication in patients with adrenal insufficiency. In order to prevent critical situations, patients have to increase their glucocorticoid dose in distressing situations. Continuous education of patients concerning dosage adaption in challenging situations seems to be important for long term management. As previously shown, both acute illness and emotional stress may lead to critical situations. In every outpatient visit patients should be able to address dosage problems concerning their daily living. In addition to that support group meetings and educational courses for emergency management for patients with chronic adrenal insufficiency seem to be a good possibility for discussing challenging situations. We wanted to know whether patients are interested in support group meetings and whether they already attended. Additionally, we wanted to know what distances patients are willing to travel to attend educational meetings. We decided to ask patients before attending our educational program teaching management of critical situations for patients with any kind of chronic adrenal insufficiency including self-application of parenteral hydrocortisone. We included 43 patients attending our educational program in 2017. Most of the patients (88%) had never attended a support group meeting. Many of those stated that they did not know about any known offer of a support group meeting (74%), while 8% mentioned long travelling distances. Only two patients were not interested in support group meetings. Two more were recently diagnosed and were not yet able to attend any meeting. Nearly all patients (95%) had never attended a special education program teaching emergency situation management before, although 45% had suffered from an adrenal crisis before. For attending our education program mean travel distance was 40 km, while maximum travel distance was 155 km. In summary, only a few patients are not interested in attending support group meetings. Most of them are willing to participate but lack information about any offers. For attendance patients tolerate longer travelling distances (mean travel distance 40 km). We recommend informing all patients about self-support groups and educational meetings on a regular basis.