Chronic diseases have a very important impact on the mental health of the people who suffer from them, which in turn can worsen the original condition or their symptoms.
These problems often take the way of 'self -stigma', a set of negative beliefs, emotional reactions and behaviors to oneself.The effect of this on the disease itself is so obvious that now a new study published in the academic environment Journal of Diabetes Investigation has found an association between self -stigma and glycosylated hemoglobin levels (HBA1C), a marker of glucose levels inBlood, in adults with type I diabetes.
As the work authors explain, the investigation was carried out on 109 adults in Japan with type I diabetes who completed questionnaires to generate a score on a self -stigma scale.Next, they quantified various indicative parameters of blood glucose control and crossed these data with the questionnaire score.
Thus, they observed that those who punctuated the scale of self -stigma tended to mark the highest at their HBA1C levels, even after adjusting other factors that could distort the results such as age, gender, labor status, the index of the index, the index of the index ofbody mass, the duration of diabetes or insulin secretion.
An important issue that these researchers underline is that, although these results are effectively solid to be considered evidence of an association between the two phenomena (self -stigma and worse blood glucose control, evidenced by altered levels of HBA1C), theStudy by its nature does not allow to conclude the existence of a causal relationship, which should therefore be investigated in research with different experimental designs.
Anyway, the study evidences the importance of addressing the psychological aspects of chronic diseases and diabetes, both from the perspective of each individual case and at the level of public policies, in order to reduce both the suffering of the patients themselves andThe load of the disease in global terms.
References
Shameno Shoko, Yukiko Onishi, Yoko Yoshida, Toshiko Takao, Tazu Tahara, Takako Kikuchi, Toshiko Kobori, Tetsuya Kubota, Masahiko Iwamoto, Masato Kasuga.Association of self-test with glycated hemoglobin: A single-center, cross-section Study of Adults with Type 1 diabetes in Japan.Journal of Diabetes Investigation (2023).DOI: Link
