The Association between Spiritual Health and Blood Sugar Control in Elderly Patients with Type 2 Diabetes

Introduction: Spirituality is taken deeply into consideration as a part of health because of its role in the control of chronic diseases and its importance in determination of life purpose in the elderly. This study aimed to investigate the association between spiritual health and blood sugar control in elderly patients with type 2 diabetes. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 200 elderly patients with type 2 diabetes from 10 rural health centers of Urmia city, north west of Iran. These patients were selected by cluster random sampling. Data were collected by Spiritual Well-Being Scale of Paloutzian and Ellison. Glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) was used to measure blood sugar control status of diabetic patients. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square test and Pearson correlation coefficient in SPSS software. Results: The spiritual health score in 43% of the elderly with diabetes was moderate and 57 % had high spiritual health level. There was statistically significant relationship between spiritual health and gender, age, education, occupation and economic status. The results also showed that there was no significant correlation between spiritual health and its subdomains with HbA1c (r = 0.07). Conclusion: In this study, there was no statistically significant difference between spiritual health scores in patients with uncontrolled and controlled blood sugar. It is suggested to conduct case-control study with larger sample size on factors affecting blood sugar control.