Quality of life of Iranian patients with type 2 diabetes: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Diabetes is one of the most common chronic metabolic disorders, and one of the essential health-related challenges in today’s world. In addition to different kind of disabilities, diabetes complications can severely impact the quality of life of patients. The present systematic review and meta-analysis are aimed at examining the quality of life of Iranian patients who have type 2 diabetes based on the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF.

A total of 16 articles published in Persian and English were reviewed without any time limitation. The search was conducted in Iranian databases, including Scientific Information Database, Magiran, and IranMedex; and international databases, including Google Scholar, Web of Science, Pub Med, and Scopus. The data was examined using the meta-analysis method and the random-effects model. Heterogeneity was assessed using the I2 statistic. The analyses were conducted in Stata, version 11.

The mean quality of life score for patients with type 2 diabetes was 61.90 (95% confidence interval: 54.40-69.40). The highest and lowest quality of life scores were for social support (49.19) and mental health (42.96) dimensions, respectively. No significant association was found between the mean quality of life score and year of publication, methodological quality, and mean age of participants (P>0.05).

Given that patients with type 2 diabetes have a lower quality of life, especially in terms of mental health, it seems necessary to better understand psychological problems common in this group of patients and design strategies to overcome them.