As type 2 diabetes requires complex self-management behaviors to avoid long-term complications, it is crucial that practitioners understand the psychosocial factors that may affect diabetic patients’ chronic disease self-management. Previous literature has identified depression and sleep disturbance as salient psychosocial factors that may impede self-management behaviors and lead to less favorable clinical biomarkers of diabetes self-management. We investigated the effects of undiagnosed depression, self-reported anxiety symptoms, diabetes distress, and obstructive sleep apnea on indicators of diabetes self-management through secondary analysis of a dataset including psychosocial, behavioral, and clinical measures from a sample of 667 diabetic patients at federally qualified health centers. It was found that depressive symptoms, regardless of diagnostic status, were associated with worse diabetes self-management, as were self-reported anxiety symptoms and diabetes distress. These relationships were not fully mediated by diabetes self-efficacy or diabetes knowledge. Obstructive sleep apnea was associated with worse medication adherence, even when controlling for measures of psychological distress. These findings suggest that primary care practitioners should routinely screen for depressive symptoms and obstructive sleep apnea risk factors and that further research is needed to determine the causal pathways linking these psychosocial risk factors to health-related outcomes for patients with type 2 diabetes.

Last modified

• 10/09/2018

Creator

• Erika Jung

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2X455

Subject

• Clinical Psychology

Keyword

• Diabetes Self-Management
• Type 2 Diabetes
• Obstructive Sleep Apnea
• Depression

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright