Depression Is Increasingly Common Among Diabetes Patients

Depression rates have increased significantly among patients with type 2 diabetes and those with type 1 diabetes, according to a recent study.

For their retrospective analysis, the researchers investigated the rate of depression among patients with type 1 diabetes and patients with type 2 diabetes by using data from the 2002-2014 Nationwide Inpatient Sample databases. They used ICD-9-CM codes to identify depression and other comorbidities. The researchers used logistic regression to investigate associations between patient characteristics and depression.
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From 2002 to 2014, the rate of depression among patients with type 2 diabetes had increased from 7.6% to 15.4%. The rate of depression among patients with type 1 diabetes had increased from 8.7% in 2002 to 19.6% in 2014. Women, non-Hispanic whites, younger patients, and patients with 5 or more chronic comorbidities had the highest rates of depression.

“The prevalence of comorbid depression among diabetic inpatients in the US is increasing rapidly,” the researchers concluded. “Although some portion of this increase could be explained by the rising prevalence of multimorbidity, increased awareness and likelihood of diagnosis of comorbid depression by physicians and better documentation as a result of the increased adoption of electronic health records likely contributed to this trend.”

—Melissa Weiss

Reference:

Chima CC, Salemi JL, Wang M, Mejia de Grubb MC, Gonzalez SJ, Zoorob RJ. Multimorbidity is associated with increased rates of depression in patients hospitalized with diabetes mellitus in the United States. J Diabetes Complications. 2017;31(11):1571-1579. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jdiacomp.2017.08.001.