Anxiety, depression and quality of life among the patients with diabetes mellitus

Abstract

Objective: Depression and anxiety are more common among the patients with diabetes in comparing with healthy people. Anxiety and depression, adversely affect the diabetic patients’ compliance, response to treatment and prognosis. Also, they increase the risk of complications, mortality and health costs, and decrease the quality of life and self-care. Recent guidelines recommend to screen depression and anxiety among diabetes patients and treat patients with any psychological problems. The aim of this study is to investigate the frequency of anxiety and depression among type two diabetes and determine their relation with quality of life.

Methods: Four-hundred type 2 diabetes mellitus patients are included in the study, who applied to Ankara Numune Training and Research Hospital, Family Medicine Department. A questionnaire is applied that investigates socio-demographic factors and stage of the disease among patients. Also, HAD scale for screening depression and anxiety and, EQ5D scale for assessing quality of life are used.

Results: 21.8% of the patients had anxiety, and 42.0% had depression. Women had higher scores both for depression (p=0.001) and anxiety (p=0.001) than men. Depression was related with higher education level, low socioeconomic level, duration of the illness, existence of hypertension and complications (p<0.05). BMI, duration of diabetes, existence of complication were also found related with anxiety (p<0.05). Quality of life was significantly lower among the obese and hypertensive patients (p<0.05).

Conclusions: This study shows that depression and anxiety among patients with diabetes are related with various factors like comorbidity, complications, BMI. Further studies are needed to show, carefull and good planned family medicine care can decrease depression and anxiety prevalence by effecting these factors.