What Is Diabetes Distress and What Are the Implications Associated with It?

In this interview filmed at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions, Kathryn Kreider, DNP, FNP-BC, BC-ADM, explains diabetes associations and the implications it has on health management for patients with diabetes.

Transcript:

Kathryn Kreider, DNP, FNP-BC, BC-ADM: Diabetes distress is defined as a negative emotional reaction to living with a chronic disease like diabetes. It's very expected in many ways, because when we think about all of the things that we ask patients to do, it's very overwhelming, and that's above and beyond what they normally do for their life, and have to think about and be concerned about. So, things like guilt, fear, being overwhelmed, being anxious, feeling burned out, those are all emotions that patients might describe. The first step is assessing. So, there are several reliable and valuable tools available to assess diabetes depression, they are free of charge available online, such as the PAID scale, which is Problem Areas in Diabetes, also the DDS which is Diabetes Distress Scale. There's also short versions of those available that are between 1 and 5 questions, which makes it really easy to assess when you're managing patients. So, assessment is extremely important because we know that diabetes distress is related to poor glycemic control and poor self care behaviours, and so its really critical for us to identify these patients to make sure we can work toward management.