Endocrine Abstracts

Background and aim: Improving the quality of life is one of the main goals of treating diabetic patients in addition to manage glycaemic control and diabetes complications. The study aim was to assess and compare the quality of life among Austrian patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus using the German version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF instrument (WHOQOL-BREF).

Methods and Materials: This was an observational study that included n = 208 patientsfrom the Diabetes center in Melk General Hospital, Lower Austria region. Of those, n = 170 were diagnosed with type 2 and n = 38 with type 1 diabetes. Quality of life was assessed using the German version of the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire over one year from 2018 to 2019. Consisting of questions about psychological, physical, social, and environmental topics, the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire covers four main domains. The response to each item in the questionnaire scored from 1 to 5 (ranged from strongly disagree to agree strongly) on the Likert scale. The raw scores in each domain were transformed into a 0 to 100 score according to the WHOQOL-BREF manual. For statistical analysis, we used R–project for statistical computing, and the Mann–Whitney U test (Wilcoxon rank-sum test) was used to compare Quality of life according to the type of diabetes.

Results: The mean HbA1c values for type 1 and type 2 patients were 61.5 mmol/mol (7.8%) and 55.5 mmol/mol (7.2%) (n.s.), respectively. 61% of all patients were male. The WHOQOL-BREF scores among both type 1 and type 2 diabetes patients were relatively high, which reflects good quality of life. Scores of the physical domain were higher in type 2 diabetes patients than in type 1 diabetes patients (64.5 ± 20.1 vs 50.5 ± 5.2, P < 0.001). Similarly, scores of the environmental domain were higher in type 2 than in type1 (84.4 ± 11.2 vs 80 ± 3.3, P 0.04). The scores of the psychological and social domains did not differ between the two groups (71.3 ± 18.1 vs 72.2 ± 16.7, P = 0.88, and 70.1 ± 20.1 vs 71.0 ± 19.6, P = 0.19, respectively.

Conclusion: This study showed that type 2 diabetic patients significantly scored higher in physical and environmental domains compared to type1 diabetic patients. Further research is needed to examine this issue in detail and also the causes that may influence the quality of life in each type of diabetes.