Negative emotions take toll on teens’ diabetes management

Salt Lake City, March 5: Negative emotions like sulking, sadness, depressiondefine and throwing out anger too often are known to take a toll on one’s character, but a new study suggests that such traits could be detrimental to health too, especially for diabetics.

Uncontrolled negative emotions can interfere with teens’ diabetes management, the researchers from the University of Utah caution.

The study featuring in the latest issue of the journal ‘Annals of Behavioral Medicine’ derives its conclusion from a close assessment of 62 adolescents with type 1 diabetesdefine, insulindefine-dependent diabetes that typically appears in childhood or early adolescence.

For two weeks, the volunteers were required to pen down their daily on-goings including details of their mood (putting each positive and negative emotion on a one-to-five-point scale), blood glucose levels, overall confidence levels, and their ability to manage their diabetes by managing daily diabetes tasks, such as eating healthy foods and taking insulin.

Upon two week tabulation, researchers found that teens with positive behavior were more likely to have lower, almost normal, blood glucose levels. Conversely, when teenagers experienced negative feelings, their overall efficacy towards better disease management lowered – they missed out on prescribed insulin dose and treated themselves with sugary stuff - thus they recorded higher blood glucose levels.

"The important issue is that for every one-point change in emotion, there is a rather sizeable change in blood glucose" Cynthia Berg, chairperson of the psychology department at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City pointed.

“Adolescence is a difficult time to manage diabetes, for multiple reasons: some of them are physiological, like puberty; some are psychological, such as increasing autonomy. Also, there’s a rise during adolescence of negative emotions” Berg marked.

But negative emotions are to be tackled well to ensure good diabetes management, Berg asserts. Uncontrolled type 1 diabetes increases the risk for many serious complications like heart disease, blindness, nerve damage, and kidney damage.