The association between depressive symptoms and glycemic control in the patients with diabetes mellitus

Park, Hye Sook; Hong, Young Sun; Lee, Hye Jin; Ha, Eun Hee; Sung, Yeon Ah

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Depressive disorders have been found to occur as an increased rates among the patients with diabetes mellitus. Some studies indicated that depression has an impact on glycemic control in the diabetic patients. However, there was no data about the depressive symptoms in Korean diabetic patients. This study aims to evaluate whether diabetic patients have higher depressive symptoms than healthy people and to know their effects on glycemic control.
METHODS
We constructed a case-control study design, and surveyed depressive symptoms using self-reported questionnaires in 156 diabetic patients and 57 controls. The severity of depressive symptoms was measured using CES-D score.
RESULTS
The CES-D score in the diabetic patients (7.6+/-5.5) was slightly higher than in the controls (6.4+/-5.8) without statistical significance. The CES-D score was significantly related to sex, marital state, education, occupation, income and general health. Using a multiple logistic regression model, we found that the odds ratio for the uncontrolled diabetic group with HbA1c more than 10% was 2.20 (95% confidence interval, 0.72-6.73) compared with the controls.
CONCLUSION
We could not found that overall diabetic patients have statistically higher depression symptom score than healthy people. But, uncontrolled diabetic patients were twice more likely to have depressive symptoms.