Is it Time to Consider Depression as a Major Complication of T2D?
Type 2 Diabetes leads to several complications and often results in distress in such patients. It affects the physical and psychological well-being thereby causing depression. Depression and Diabetes have a bidirectional relationship where one is the cause factor for another. The research titled “Is it time to consider Depression as a major complication of Type 2 Diabetes. Evidence from a large population based cohort study” was conducted by Paola Rucci and colleagues and the summary has been given below.
Objective:
To evaluate the prevalence of depression over a decade from the diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes.
To determine the demographic and clinical predictors of depression and to estimate the magnitude to which depression becomes a risk factor for acute and long-term complications of diabetes and mortality.
Methods:
Patients with Type 2 Diabetes without any history of depression were selected from Italy from 2008 to 2017 and followed up till 2020. Logistic regression model was employed to determine the predictors of depression and Cox-regression models were used to evaluate the chances of long-term complications.
Findings:
Females above 65 living in rural areas and having co-morbid conditions were certain predictors of the onset of depression. The main findings of the research were that depression highly surged the risk by 2.33 times of developing acute complications, 1.6 fold risk of developing long-term complications and 2.8 times the mortality risk.
Hence adherence to treatment followed by adequate social support should be adopted. Introducing new-practices to consider patient’s emotional needs may enhance the professionals’ efforts to tackle distress in patients.
Limitations:
Inadequate clinical information which could have led to better characterization of patients and the identification of clinical predictors of poor outcomes. The diagnosis of depression was not conclusive. Besides patients receiving treatment for depression in private practices may have been missed hence the overall risk was underestimated. Another limitation was that the data was collected from discharge records and hence complications managed in such patients were not determined.
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