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 Researchers surveyed 308 veterans with diabetes who all had a person
in their life - often a spouse or adult child - they leaned on for
support managing their condition. Researchers focused on how
stressed patients felt about their disease and how much friends and
loved ones acknowledged patients' feelings and praised their efforts
to do things like eat right, exercise, take medications and check
their blood sugar.
As expected, patients with the most emotional distress from managing
diabetes tended to have higher blood sugar levels than people who
didn't feel much diabetes-related stress.
But when the most stressed people had a supporter in their corner
who offered positive encouragement, they had healthier blood sugar
levels that were similar to patients who didn't experience much
stress.
"High levels of diabetes related distress can cause people with
diabetes to feel overwhelmed and powerless in their ability to
manage their diabetes," said lead study author Aaron Lee of the VA
Ann Arbor Center for Clinical Management Research in Michigan.
"These thoughts and feelings can undermine the daily efforts needed
to manage diabetes, such as taking diabetes medications, exercising,
eating a healthy diet, and checking blood (sugar) levels," Lee said
by email.
Helping patients overcome these feelings requires more than just
good intentions. Friends and family members also need to say the
right things.
Nagging, criticizing and blaming patients for their failure to
manage diabetes well can often backfire, and make matters worse, Lee
said. Instead, loved ones should offer what's known as "autonomy
support," which praises good efforts and supports patients'
self-care choices.
"Our research indicates that how people support family and friends
with diabetes may be just as, or more important than, how much
support they provide," Lee said.
At the start of the study, participants were 66 years old on
average. Almost all of them were male, and most were white.
They typically had poorly controlled diabetes, based on blood tests
that show the percentage of hemoglobin (a molecule on red blood
cells) that is coated with sugar. So-called hemoglobin A1c levels
reflect average blood sugar levels over about three months. Readings
above 6.5 signal diabetes, and during the year-long study
participants had average readings of 7.9.
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Participants had moderate levels of stress about managing their
illness, based on questionnaires asking them to rate their emotional
distress from on a scale from 1 (not a problem) to 6 (a very serious
problem).
When they didn't have much support from family or friends, each
one-unit increase on the distress scale was associated with a 0.2
increase in A1c readings during the year.
But when participants had lots of the right kind of encouragement,
increased stress was not linked to any meaningful spike in A1c
readings.
The study wasn't a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how support from friends and family might directly impact A1c
readings.
It also focused on a narrow subset of the overall population with
diabetes - white men who served in the military - and it's possible
the results might be different for women, or people from other
racial or ethnic groups, researchers note in Diabetes Care.
Still, the findings add to growing evidence suggesting that the
right kind of help from family and friends can make a big difference
to patients living with diabetes as well as other chronic health
problems like cancer or heart disease, said Dr. Pouran Faghri,
director of the Center for Environmental Health and Health Promotion
at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
"This present study is in agreement with previous research that
emotional support from family members may alleviate the emotional
and physical distress related to the disease and help the person
with diabetes better manage their chronic condition," Faghri, who
wasn't involved in the study, said by email.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2Jt5Jti Diabetes Care, March 28, 2018.
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