Quality of Life and Psychiatric Symptoms in the Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Objective: The purpose of this study is to measure the depression and anxiety levels, to investigate their associations with sociodemographic variables and to emphasize the importance of multidisciplinary approach for the follow up and treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). Method: We enrolled randomly selected 100 consecutive patients with type 2 DM, admitted to the outpatient clinic of endocrinology. Age, gender and marital status matched 100 volunteers served as control group. Sociodemographic data form and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD), Short Form-36 (SF-36) were performed for all participants. Results: For SF-36, all subscale mean scores were found to be lower in type 2 DM patients as compared to control group. HAD-Anxiety (HAD-A) and HAD-Depression (HAD-D) mean scores in the group of patients were found to be higher than the mean scores of the control group. The difference was significant for HAD-D, whereas negligible for HAD-A. In both patient and control groups, subscales of life quality were found to be negatively correlated with both depression and anxiety. Comparing the HAD-A and the HAD-D mean scores according to the gender, both subscale mean points were higher in female than male in both groups. When the SF-36 subscale scores for males and females were compared, it was found that females have lower scores in all the subscales. HAD-A and HAD-D mean scores were found to be positively correlated with the duration of diabetes, however, this correlation was not statistically significant. Conclusions: In this study, it was found that type 2 DM have extremely deteriorated the quality of life of the patients and caused many psychological signs accompanying clinic. Thus, our study has shown the necessity of consultation and emphasizes the liaison for clinics.