Common mental disorders in adolescents with and without type 1 diabetes: Reported occurrence from a countrywide survey

Abstract

Aims: The aim of this study was to evaluate the frequency of common mental disorders symptoms in adolescents with type 1 diabetes in comparison to a population-based sample of adolescents in Brazil.

Methods: We compared characteristics of 116 youth with type 1 diabetes and 73,508 youth without type 1 diabetes from the same population-based sample of adolescents aged 12-17years, taken from the Brazilian Study of Cardiovascular Risk in Adolescents (ERICA). We evaluated the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) score, which is a self-administered screening survey for detecting mental health symptoms. Scores ≥3 were used to determine common mental disorder.

Results: Adolescents with and without type 1 diabetes were comparable with respect to age and race/ethnicity distributions. Youth with type 1 diabetes did not report higher scores on the weighted GHQ analyses in comparison to youth without type 1 diabetes (3.16, SE 0.76 vs. 2.10, SE 0.03, respectively; P = .167). No differences were found regarding the odds of having a GHQ score ≥3 (OR 1.48, 95% CI 0.72-3.08). However, analyses of mental health symptoms separately consistently showed that youth with type 1 diabetes more frequently endorsed mental health barriers in comparison to youth without type 1 diabetes.

Conclusions: Mental health symptoms seem to be more frequent than diagnosis of common mental disorders in adolescents with type 1 diabetes, which may also interfere in glycemic control. Our findings highlight the need for appropriate mental health assessment in diabetes care in order to prevent glycemic control deterioration.

Keywords: Adolescent; Mental health; Type 1 diabetes.