Letter to the Editor
Impact of Diabetic Foot on Selected Psychological
or Social Characteristics
Ugur Cakir,
1
Ertugrul Kargi,
2
Hakan Sarman,
3
and Cengiz Isik
3
1
Department of Psychiatry, Abant Izzet Baysal University, School of Medicine, Bolu, Turkey
2
Department of General Surgery, Abant Izzet Baysal University, School of Medicine, Bolu, Turkey
3
Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Abant Izzet Baysal University, School of Medicine, Golkoy, 14280 Bolu, Turkey
Correspondence should be addressed to Hakan Sarman; hakansarman@yahoo.com
Received 11 July 2014; Accepted 27 August 2014; Published 21 October 2014
Academic Editor: James Wrobel
Copyright © 2014 Ugur Cakir et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
With great interest, we read the recent paper [1]“Does the
diabetic foot have a signiicant impact on selected psychological
or social characteristics of patients with diabetes mellitus?”. he
authors aimed to compare selected psychological and social
characteristics between diabetic patients with and without the
diabetic foot (DF). hey have concluded that patients with DF
had a predominantly worse standard of living and patients
with DF appeared to have good stress tolerability and mental
health and did not reveal severe forms of depression or any
associated consequences.
It is very well known that comorbidity of depression
with diabetes mellitus is related to poor glycemic control,
higher severity of diabetic complications, increased risk of
cardiovascular diseases, higher functional disability, and poor
treatment adherence [2, 3].
In contradiction to what is mentioned above and the
authors’ expectation, the study results showed no signiicant
diferences between the two groups regarding depression
scores. In addition to the authors’ reasonable discussion, we
want to stress another possible factor not mentioned in the
study which is that the patients in both groups may be on
or have history of antidepressant treatment. We believe it
seems important to assess the presence of antidepressant
treatment in the future studies to assess presence of depressive
symptoms.
Conflict of Interests
he authors declare that there is no conlict of interests
regarding the publication of this paper.
References
[1] V. Fejfarov´ a, A. Jirkovsk´ a, E. Dragomireck´ a et al., “Does the dia-
betic foot have a signiicant impact on selected psychological or
social characteristics of patients with diabetes mellitus?” Journal
of Diabetes Research, vol. 2014, Article ID 371938, 7 pages, 2014.
[2] J. K. Rustad, D. L. Musselman, and C. B. Nemerof, “he rela-
tionship of depression and diabetes: pathophysiological and
treatment implications,” Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 36, no.
9, pp. 1276–1286, 2011.
[3] J. Zhang, C.-P. Xu, H.-X. Wu et al., “Comparative study of the
inluence of diabetes distress and depression on treatment
adherence in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes: a cross-
sectional survey in the People’s Republic of China,” Neuropsy-
chiatric Disease and Treatment, vol. 9, pp. 1289–1294, 2013.
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Journal of Diabetes Research
Volume 2014, Article ID 981721, 1 page
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/981721