Having type 1 diabetes will permanently change a patient’s life. From the moment of diagnosis, patients will have to consider their diet, insulin therapy, exercise, and self-monitoring of blood glucose every day. This will influence a patient’s health-related quality of life (1).
The aim of this study was to investigate the health-related quality of life of patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes in the first year after diagnosis and to compare their health-related quality of life, 1 year after diagnosis, with people of comparable age from the general population.
Health-related quality of life was assessed using the RAND-36 (2). The RAND-36 is an instrument containing eight different life domains, from which a physical component summary (PCS) and a mental component summary (MCS) can be calculated. Wilcoxon’s signed-rank tests were used to compare scores at baseline with scores at 1 year and to compare scores between populations.
We studied 15 patients (5 men and 10 women) with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes aged 29.2 ± 12.0 years (range 14–54; mean ± SD). HbA1c levels declined significantly after 1 year (14.3 vs. 6.9%, P = 0.001).
The PCS showed a statistically significant improvement in the first year after diagnosis from 48.8 ± 7.3 to 54.4 ± 3.4 (P = 0.004). The MCS increased but did not show a statistically significant increase 1 year after diagnosis (47.1 ± 12.5 to 50.8 ± 11.5, P = 0.173).
After 1 year, health-related quality of life was comparable with that of subjects in the general population (PCS 52.8 ± 1.8, P = 0.053; MCS 50.7 ± 1.5, P = 0.570).
Although health-related quality of life is initially decreased when the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes is made, the impact of all the cumbersome aspects of the disease appears to be minimal 1 year after diagnosis. Therapy and self-management are apparently accepted and incorporated fairly quickly into daily life, at least in the first year after diagnosis. Although the number of patients included in this study is not large, we nevertheless found statistically significant changes in health-related quality of life over time.
We can conclude that health-related quality of life, physical health-related quality of life in particular, improves in patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes within the first year after diagnosis. One year after diagnosis, health-related quality of life is comparable with that of subjects from the general population.
Article Information
We thank the Northern Center for Healthcare Research of the University of Groningen for providing data of a sample of the general Dutch population.
References
Address correspondence to H.E. Hart, MD, Institute for Health Policy and Management, Erasmus Medical Center, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected].
