ABSTRACT

Background: Diabetes mellitus is one of the highly prevalent chronic diseases that can impact the life greatly, not only by its own disease process, but also due to wide range of other social and psychological effects on one’s life. Generalized anxiety disorder is one of these complications, but is highly under rated.

Aim: To determine the frequency of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) among cases with Diabetes Mellitus presenting to out-patient Diabetes clinic of Lahore General Hospital, Lahore.

Place and duration of study: This study was carried out in the Department of Medicine, Lahore General Hospital, Lahore from 10-06-18 to 10-06-19.

Methodology: This was a cross sectional study. The cases with both gender and age range of 30 to 60 years with known history of DM for at least one year were included. Anxiety was labelled on the basis of GAD scale and score of 5 or more was labelled as yes.

Results: In this study there were total 192 cases of DM and out of them 98 (51.04%) were males. The mean age of the subjects was 51.20±8.16 years and mean HbA1c level was 8.78±2.34. There were 127 (66.15%) cases with type II DM, and only 28(14.58%) had controlled DM. Generalized anxiety disorder was seen in 72 (37.50%) of cases. GAD was significantly high in females affecting 44 out of 94 cases with p= 0.03. The cases with duration of DM of 5 or more years had GAD significantly high (64 out of 120) cases with p= 0.01. The cases who were un-employed had significantly higher number of cases suffering from GAD; affecting 58 out of 106 with p= 0.01.

Conclusion: GAD is common and seen in almost more than every 3rd case suffering from DM and those with DM for 5 years or more, un-employed or those who were widow or divorced had it significantly high.

Keywords: DM, GAD, HbA1c