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Abstract

Although quality of life evaluations are widely used throughout medicine, relatively little is known about the psychological processes involved in making these judgements. What is known is that quality of life judgements are not straightforwardly associated with objective measures of health status or clinician ratings. In particular, patient affect appears to be associated with quality of life ratings but whether this relationship is secondary to physical health or not is controversial. The aim of this study was to determine the role of anxiety and depression in the reporting of quality of life in a group of patients with diabetes mellitus. One hundred consecutive patients with diabetes (insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus n = 36 and non-insulin-dependent diabetes n = 64) were assessed using a self-report measure of quality of life, a symptom checklist and a questionnaire measure of anxiety and depression. In addition, they were independently rated for their level of physical impairment. The results showed that depression and, to a lesser extent, anxiety were significantly related to self-reported quality of life even when the differences in physical health and age were controlled for statistically. This study shows that, independent of the level of physical illness, affect, particularly depressive affect, is an important factor in the determination of quality of life.

Anxiety associated with self monitoring of capillary blood glucose

“…It has been suggested that the proportion of cases, for example, on the HADS having a DSM-1V-R diagnosis of general anxiety is poor. 10 One of the purposes, of the present study was to identify possible cases of general anxiety rather than diagnose generalised anxiety disorder, and the results concur with previous reports.…”

Depression and Quality of Life in Patients with Diabetes: A Systematic Review from the European Depression in Diabetes (EDID) Research Consortium

“…The four studies that used more extensive versions of the Short Form Health Survey (SF-20 to SF-36) allowed a comparison based on the subscales of the Short Form; physical function, role function, overall health, social function, pain and mental health [12, 15, 16, 18]. This comparison shows that depressive symptoms were most strongly associated with role function and social function (moderate to severely poorer scores, Table 2 ).…”

“…Individuals with both diabetes and depressive symptoms were less satisfied with their treatment, experienced a greater impact of the treatment, worried more about the impact of diabetes in the future and about the social and vocational impact of diabetes. In addition to these studies, Kohen et al [15] investigated the association of depressive symptoms with the number of hypoglycaemic events and other symptoms of diabetes, but did not find any difference between diabetic individuals with and without depressive symptoms.…”

Quality of Life in Medically Ill Persons with Comorbid Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…1). Sixty-five primary studies (69 publications) fulfilled inclusion criteria (diabetes: n = 23 [10,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56]; CAD: n = 26 [57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83]; asthma: n = 13 [84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97]; chronic back pain: n = 3 [98,99,100]; colorectal cancer: n = 0). In most cases, depressive disorders were studied (n = 45), followed by anxiety disorders (n = 14), any mental disorder (i.e.…”