Associations between Depression and Diabetes in the Community: Do Symptom Dimensions Matter? Results from the Gutenberg Health Study

Jörg Wiltink, Matthias Michal, Philipp S Wild, Astrid Schneider, Jochem König, Maria Blettner, Thomas Münzel, Andreas Schulz, Matthias Weber, Christian Fottner, Norbert Pfeiffer, Karl Lackner and Manfred E Beutel

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 8, 1-6

Abstract: Objectives: While a bidirectional relationship between diabetes and depression has been established, there is little knowledge if the associations are due to somatic-affective or cognitive-affective dimensions of depression. Research Design and Methods: In a population-based, representative survey of 15.010 participants we therefore studied the associations of the two dimensions of depression with diabetes and health care utilization among depressed and diabetic participants. Depression was assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire PHQ-9. Results: We found a linear and consistent association between the intensity of depression and the presence of diabetes increasing from 6.9% in no or minimal depression to 7.6% in mild, 9% in moderate and 10.5% in severe depression. There was a strong positive association between somatic-affective symptoms but not with cognitive-affective symptoms and diabetes. Depression and diabetes were both independently related to somatic health care utilisation. Conclusions: Diabetes and depression are associated, and the association is primarily driven by the somatic-affective component of depression. The main limitation of our study pertains to the cross-sectional data acquisition. Further longitudinal work on the relationship of obesity and diabetes should differentiate the somatic and the cognitive symptoms of depression.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0105499 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 05499&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0105499

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105499

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().