Diabetes and depression

An interesting oral abstract was just presented, the first of many dealing with diabetes and depression. As many of you can probably appreciate, people who have diabetes often get depressed, disappointed and frustrated, not only with diabetes but their life status.

There has been a lot of research, as you might expect, on understanding why this occurs - is it more than just the hardship of diabetes?

What we do know is the prevalence of depression in people with diabetes is much greater that the prevalence of depression in the general population. So the question is - Does diabetes cause depression or does depression cause diabetes?

There are a number of abstracts dealing with depression at the meeting this year. In this first study, a group of people who were diagnosed with diabetes were not told they had diabetes. They were then given a mental health test - a PHQ score - which is a measure of depression. These patients who were not told they had diabetes tended to have normal PHQ values. However, a different group of patients who were diagnosed with diabetes and told so, had lower values indicating that they were depressed about it.

As one might normally expect, it's not the diabetes altered state of metabolism but rather the knowledge that one has diabetes that leads to depression. The general awareness of health risk that is conferred upon people with diabetes may actually contribute to depression.