Abstract
Objective: To determine alexithymic characteristics and affecting factors in the elderly with diabetes mellitus.Methods: This study was planned as a cross-sectional and descriptive study and was conducted in a state Hospital with 120 elderly patients with diabetes. Data were collected using a personal information form and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale.Results: Alexithymia was found in 75.8% of the elderly with diabetes mellitus. It was determined that patients experienced higher than average difficulty in describing and identifying feelings. They also had more externally-oriented thinking styles. Patients’ income levels, family structure and illness duration affected their manifestation of alexithymic characteristics.Conclusion: Majority of elderly patients with diabetes exhibited alexithymic characteristics. However, these were not shown to be associated with sex, age, marital, educational or professional status. In addition, no connection was found between alexithymia and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), body mass index (BMI), postprandial glucose (PBG), and the treatment and complications of diabetes mellitus.doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12669/pjms.296.2159How to cite this:Hintistan S, Cilingir D, Birinci N. Alexithymia among elderly patients with diabetes. Pak J Med Sci 2013;29(6):1344-1348. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12669/pjms.296.2159This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Highlights
Advancing age often brings physical, psychological and social changes as well as an increase in the occurrence of chronic diseases.[1]
The TAS-20 has 3 subscales: the first subscale is Difficulty Identifying Feelings (DIF) “I have difficulty identifying the correct words for my emotions”; the second subscale is Difficulty Describing Feelings (DDF) “I have difficulty describing my emotions”; and the third subscale is Externally-Oriented Thinking (EOT) “I would rather talk about people’s daily life activities than their emotions”
Alexithymic characteristics of the study participants with diabetes mellitus Type II (DM) were presented in Table-II
Summary
Advancing age often brings physical, psychological and social changes as well as an increase in the occurrence of chronic diseases.[1] One chronic and physical disease of the elderly population is diabetes mellitus Type II (DM), which often includes many psychiatric and psycho-social dimensions.[2,3] The exact meaning of alexithymia is “without words for emotion.”. This condition manifests itself as an inability to describe and identify emotions.
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