COMPARISON OF QUALITY OF LIFE IN DIABETIC & NON DIABETIC OLDER PEOPLE

B. Kaydawala¹, M. Sheth¹

¹Gujarat University, SBB College of Physiotherapy, Ahmedabad, India

Background: Geriatrics are people who are older than a chronological age of 65 or higher. With aging, people may be perceived as "frail" due to psychological, cognitive, and social problems in addition to physical ones. Aging is associated with functional impairments and add to their complicated health status. Loss of mobility is an impairment that come with diabetes type 2 (T2DM). When basic everyday actions like getting out of a chair, climbing stairs, and carrying groceries become difficult, reduced mobility affects a wide variety of daily activities and has an influence on an individual's independence. Muscle strength loss is also associated to T2DM. Therefore, a greater effort is needed to be physically active as muscular weakness increases. With these abnormalities older people with diabetes experience a loss of independence and health-related quality of life as a result of the increased prevalence of diabetes and associated co-morbidities and effects.

Purpose: Recently, developing countries have turned their attention to the growing elderly population. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of life of older people with and without diabetes.

Methods: Eighty elderly participants with and without diabetes participated in an observational analytical study. Males and females aged 65 to 80 years were included in the study using convenience sampling. Participants with neurological disorders, any recent surgical history, malignancies, recently traumatic conditions, severe musculoskeletal conditions, and diabetes complications (retinopathy, neuropathy, and nephropathy) or using walking aids were excluded. One group included older participants with Diabetes and the other group had non-diabetic older people. The WHOQOL BREF which has four domains was used to evaluate quality of life in both groups. Data was analysed using SPSS V20. Level of significance was kept at 5%.

Results: Mann Whitney U test was used to analyse differences in the means of the domain scores of WHOQOL BREF between both groups. Participants with diabetes were found to have statistically significant lower scores on physical health (1.87+0.25, U=399.0, p=0.001), social relationships (1.2+0.24, U=578.5, 0.031), and environment (1.6+1, U=538.5, p=0.001) than people without diabetes. Mean psychological (1+1.19, U= 677.5, p=0.23) ratings on the WHOQOL BREF did not differ between the two groups. Weak correlation was seen between duration of diabetes with different components of quality of life, physical health(r= -0.28, p=0.08), psychological(r= -0.39, p=0.11), Social relationship(r= 0.25, p=0.88) and environment (r= -0.18, p=0.27).

Conclusions: Compared to older adults without diabetes, older adults with diabetes have lower quality of life in terms of physical health, social connections, and environmental factors. However, psychological factors related to quality of life are not different in older people with diabetes as they age compared to without. Weak correlation is found between duration of diabetes and domains of qulity of life.

Implications: Diabetes and its associated effects are more common in older people which increases the pace of functional and quality of life deterioration. Social relationship could not be measured accurately as participants were not open to answering questions related to sex. Studies about interventions to improve quality of life of older population with diabetes can be carried out.

Funding acknowledgements: Funding was not provided for this study

Keywords:
Diabetic elder
Quality of life
Geriatrics

Topics:
Community based rehabilitation
Older people
Health promotion & wellbeing/healthy ageing/physical activity

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: SBB College of Physiotherapy, Ahmedabad-380006.

Committee: The Institutional Review Board of SBB College of Physiotherapy, Ahmedabad-380006.

Ethics number: PT-7/BK/MS/GERIATRIC/2021-22.