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Family Relationships and Diabetes Care During the Adult Years

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Introduction

 
Clinical lore, backed by extensive literature, has supported an ongoing interest among clinicians in how family relationships affect and are affected by diabetes. Nowhere has this interest been more attended to than during childhood and adolescence, and a growing interest is evolving in caring for patients who are elderly. There is, however, a notable gap in clinical attention concerning how family relationships influence diabetes management during the adult years.¹

This is somewhat surprising because the mean age of diagnosis of type 2 diabetes falls in the fifth decade of life, and a growing number of new patients are being diagnosed in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.² In this article, I argue that family and couple relationships during the adult years are as important for diabetes management and outcomes as they are for individuals with diabetes who are children, adolescents, or elderly. Furthermore, I suggest that educational and behavioral intervention programs need to address the family context of disease management among adults as they do for patients in other developmental life stages.

I pose three questions to guide the discussion. First, what aspects of family and couple relationships are linked to the management of diabetes during the adult years? This is an important question for two reasons: documenting links between the family and diabetes also identifies important risk and protective factors that can define high-risk family settings for early intervention. Knowing what aspects of family life are tied to diabetes outcomes also identifies targets for intervention. For example, if we find that poor conflict resolution skills between marital partners around diabetes issues are linked to poor clinical outcomes, poor conflict resolution becomes both an indicator of early risk and an area in which we might want to intervene with a structured conflict resolution skill-building program.

Second, what are the documented health . . . [Full Text of this Article]

	What Family Factors Are Linked to Diabetes Management and Outcomes?

 

	What Are The Health Risks to Partners of People With Diabetes?

 
Biological risk
Health behavioral risk
Affective/emotional risk

	What Do We Know About Couple/Family Interventions in Diabetes?

 

	Conclusions

 

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