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

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 chisquare 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.