929-P: Person-First Language in Diabetes and Obesity Scientific Publications: Are We Making Progress?

Several professional societies endorse the use of person-first language (PFL) in communication involving people with diabetes or obesity. The purpose of this analysis was to determine the extent to which scholarly articles focusing on diabetes or obesity use PFL. We reviewed existing guidelines and constructed separate lists of PFL and condition-first language (CFL) terms for diabetes and obesity (e.g., diabetic, obese) . Exact phrase searches were conducted using PubMed from 2011-2020 and resultant articles were categorized as PFL, CFL, or both. Journal-specific factors (e.g., scope, PFL policy) were extracted from a manual review of author guidelines. The searches yielded 56048 scholarly articles for diabetes and 45584 for obesity. Among diabetes articles, 42.8% used PFL, 40.1% used CFL, and 17.2% contained both (p