Rate and correlates of depression in diabetic patients in Baghdad

Background: Depression is a 'quiet crisis' facing diabetics, their families and their health care providers. Financially and emotionally this crisis is exacting a terrible cost. (1) The possibility of depression catising diabetes was first advanced in 1684 by Thomas Objectives: • To study frequency of depression among people with diabetes. • To study socio-demographic data associated with depression, diabetes, and their co-morbidity. Methodology: This case control study was conducted during the period from 1st June, 2005 to 30th march 2006. Two samples were chosen for this study, 100 diabetic patients; 50 IDDM and 50 NIDDM, and 100 non-diabetics as a control. The two samples were matched for age and sex. All the diabetic patients included was between the ages 20-60 years. Fifty of them were females and fifty were males. Results: The prevalence of depression in diabetics in the study is higher than that in other studies. This study has shown that depression is prevalent among patient with both type-I and type-II diabetes and there is no difference in its distribution between IDDM and NIDDM as both of them required complex life changes. Our study was consistent with other studies: #Study done by Anderson -RJ; 2001(13) #Study done by Lust man-PJ; 2002 (2) The higher. Conclusions: The rate of depression in diabetic patients was more than two fold higher than that non-diabetic people. Depression interferes, with all aspects of functioning prevalence of (Depression in diabetic females compared to diabetic males but did not approach statistical significance, but it did in the non-diabetic group (p>0.05).