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 Peers can help teens and young adults accept their disease and
follow their treatment plans, but youth who are too attuned to what
their friends think of them may neglect disease management to fit
in, the authors report in Diabetes Care.
“This was one of the first studies to ask adolescents and emerging
adults with type 1 diabetes about their relations with peers at a
certain point in time and one year later,” lead author Koen
Raymaekers from the University of Leuven in Belgium told Reuters
Health by email.
“We found that more general positive relations with peers at one
point in time predicted less diabetes-specific distress one year
later,” he said.
But, because young adults who were very oriented toward peers at the
start had worse blood sugar control a year later, paying additional
attention to peer relations during this time seems important,
Raymaekers added.
The researchers recruited more than 400 Dutch-speaking young people
in Belgium, aged 14 to 25, with type 1 diabetes. The participants
answered questionnaires rating how they felt about the support they
got from their peers as well as their perceptions of their parents’
responsiveness to their needs.
The study team also measured “peer orientation” - whether
participants were more likely to listen to their parents or to their
peers - with questions such as, “Would you ignore your diabetes
management needs in order to make someone like you?”
The researchers had access to long-term blood sugar measurements and
the young people answered questions about their treatment adherence
as well as their diabetes-related distress levels.
The study team found that having supportive peers was associated
with less diabetes-related distress over time. But, having extreme
peer orientation was associated with greater treatment distress over
time and poorer blood sugar control.
Conversely, good treatment adherence was tied to lower
peer-orientation scores, less treatment distress and better blood
sugar control.
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Youth who reported having more responsive parents tended to have
less food distress over time, the researchers also found.
“Our study indicates that as a parent/grandparent/caregiver it may
be informative to ask about patients’ peer relations,” Raymaekers
said.
If patients indicate that they experience difficulties with peer
relations this may have an impact on their diabetes-related distress
and perhaps even on treatment adherence and blood sugar control in
the long term, he said.
“In addition, some patients may experience their diabetes as a
burden when interacting with peers, and therefore neglect treatment
in favor of fitting in with peers,” Raymaekers noted.
Therefore, he said, when there are indications of problematic
relations with peers, as a parent/grandparent/caregiver one could
think and talk with the patient on how to improve these relations
without sacrificing treatment or feeling distressed by their
diabetes.
Raymaekers added that he was not surprised to see that peers are
important for patients with type 1 diabetes, but there were some
specific “rather striking” findings, for example, that the 18-24
year olds who were very oriented toward peers at baseline had worse
blood sugar control one year later.
There is a need for more research on this topic, which could uncover
the cause and effect relationships between peer relationships and
diabetes outcomes and the mechanisms at work, he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2A4oiU8 Diabetes Care, online November 14,
2017.
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