Psychosomatic complaints profile in patients with type 2 diabetes: a matched case-control study

Abstract

Objective: To compare the prevalence of psychosomatic symptoms and their mean scores of profiles in diabetic patients and sample of sex-age-matched healthy controls. Methods: This case-control study was conducted on 87 patients with type 2 diabetes. The control group consisted of 259 age-and gender-matched healthy participants. Psychosomatic symptoms were assessed using a comprehensive 31-item questionnaire, and psychological problems were evaluated by 12-item General Health Questionnaire and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Factor analysis, independent Student's t test, analysis of variance, and chi-square test were used for analyzing of data. Results: The frequency of 18 psychosomatic symptoms was significantly higher in diabetic patients with psychological problems compared with controls (P < 0.05), and the most frequent were "severe fatigue" (54.3%), "feeling low on energy" (48.6%), "disturbing thoughts" (45.7%), "pain in the joints" (34.3%), and "eyesore" (32.4%). There were significant differences in terms of "psycho-fatigue" (P ≤ 0.0001), "gastrointestinal" (P = 0.018), "neuroskeletal" (P = 0.001), and "pharyngeal-respiratory" (P = 0.009) profiles between studied groups. Conclusions: In conclusion, diabetic patients with psychological problems had a higher frequency of psychosomatic symptoms and also higher scores of psychosomatic disorder profiles than control participants. However, further prospective investigations are required to assess whether the psychosomatic disorder/symptom pattern was caused by conditions of diabetes disease.

The impact of mental and somatic stressors on physical activity and sedentary behaviour in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus: a diary study

“…We had expected that both mental and somatic stressors would be an obstacle for participants' activity levels during that day. Individuals with T2DM may experience a variety of mental and somatic stressors, such as sadness (Darwish et al, 2018) and pain (Heidari et al, 2019), and some of these have been associated with more sedentary behaviour and low levels of PA. For example, Chastin et al (2014) found that pain was one of the main drivers for being sedentary, albeit not in a sample of patients with T2DM. There are at least three explanations for the current results.…”

“…Participants filled out the morning diary using their personal computer or tablet and could only access and complete the morning diary between 3 AM and 11 AM. The morning diary assessed mental and somatic stressors that are prevalent in individuals with T2DM (i.e., fatigue (Fritschi & Quinn, 2010;Heidari et al, 2019), stress (Hackett & Steptoe, 2017;Qiu et al, 2017), sadness (Ali et al, 2006;Darwish et al, 2018), pain (Heidari et al, 2019;Kirk et al, 2019), nausea/dizziness (Heidari et al, 2019) and numbness/tingling in the limbs (Aikens, 1998;Kästenbauer et al, 2004)). All mental and somatic stressors were assessed using single-item measures.…”

“…Individuals with T2DM often experience mental and somatic stressors in daily life (Fritschi & Quinn, 2010;Heidari et al, 2019). In comparison with the general population, people with T2DM are more likely to experience a major depressive episode (Darwish et al, 2018) and to experience fatigue and pain (Heidari et al, 2019). As yet, no research has examined whether within-person alterations in mental and somatic stressors affect activity levels throughout the day in individuals with T2DM.…”