Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Diabetes. Apr 15, 2017; 8(4): 120-129
Published online Apr 15, 2017. doi: 10.4239/wjd.v8.i4.120
Type 2 diabetes and quality of life
Aikaterini Trikkalinou, Athanasia K Papazafiropoulou, Andreas Melidonis
Aikaterini Trikkalinou, Athanasia K Papazafiropoulou, Andreas Melidonis, 1st Department of Internal Medicine and Diabetes Center, Tzaneio General Hospital of Piraeus, 18536 Piraeus, Greece
Author contributions: Trikkalinou A and Papazafiropoulou AK wrote the paper; Μelidonis A performed the revision.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Authors declare no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Athanasia K Papazafiropoulou, MD, MSc, PhD, 1st Department of Internal Medicine and Diabetes Center, Tzaneio General Hospital of Piraeus, 1 Zanni and Afentouli Street, 18536 Piraeus, Greece. pathan@ath.forthnet.gr
Telephone: +30-697-9969483
Received: June 29, 2016
Peer-review started: July 1, 2016
First decision: August 5, 2016
Revised: January 5, 2017
Accepted: January 16, 2017
Article in press: January 18, 2017
Published online: April 15, 2017
Processing time: 288 Days and 15.5 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Although numerous articles and reviews are written about diabetes every year regarding epidemiology, complications, therapies, comparisons of treatments, health strategies, literature data on diabetic patient’s quality of life and how much it is actually affected by complications, comorbidities or different treatments are limited. The current review is focused on: (1) the way patients perceive the changes in different aspects of quality of their lives as recorded by numerous psychometric tools and scales; (2) on the similarities and differences among studies performed worldwide along with the problems and caveats in research; and (3) on aspects intriguing but demanding further research as the effect of diabetes in family life or the common metabolic pathways between diabetes and dementia (recently called also diabetes type 3).