DENVER — Depression was nearly twice as common among adults who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, compared with adults who had either normal or impaired fasting plasma glucose levels and those with undiagnosed diabetes, Mirjam J. Knol said in a poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society.
The prevalence of depression was 17% in the 3,205 adults with a normal fasting plasma glucose (less than 5.6 mmol/L), 14.6% in the 534 subjects with impaired FPG (5.6–7.0 mmol/L), and 13.3% among 30 undiagnosed subjects who met the criteria for type 2 diabetes (FPG of at least 7.0 mmol/L).
By contrast, the prevalence of depression was 32.7% in the 49 patients who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, wrote Ms. Knol of the University Medical Center, Utrecht (the Netherlands). The study was supported in part by Novo Nordisk.
The data were taken from a larger study, the Utrecht Health Project, and the investigators excluded patients with cardiovascular disease and type 1 diabetes.
Overall, patients who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes had a twofold increase in depression, even after adjusting for age, body mass index, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, education level, and the number of comorbid conditions.
The increased risk of depression among diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients suggests that depression in this population is a consequence of the psychosocial burden of the illness, rather than a contributor to it, Ms. Knol wrote.
In a related study aimed at estimating the effects of depression on utilization among patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, Medicaid claims data were analyzed for more than 4,000 type 2 diabetics with and without depression. Dr. Iftekhar Kalsekar of the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Butler University in Indianapolis, and colleagues found that those with depression had nearly 65% higher overall health care costs than those without depression (Manag. Care Interface 2006;19:39–46).