²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ¹ÙÍø

Diabetes mellitus is an increasingly important public health concern. It is a disease that must be controlled over the lifetime of a person. In addition, there is a high prevalence of chronic medical conditions among subjects with diabetes mellitus. It’s especially prevalent in the elderly and is one of the leading causes of disability in adults over 45 years of age. The purpose of this research is to provide information to health care providers and professionals on ways to facilitate self- management of patients with diabetes. In this study, the researcher relies on the client’s own perception of his/her quality of life and distress he/she experiences regarding his/her illness. The 4 questionnaires that were used to assess the quality of life and symptom distress among the 75 respondents diagnosed with diabetes are as follows. The General Health Questionnaire developed by Goldberg in the 1970’s was used to measure minor psychological distress, the Diabetes Empowerment Scale for measuring the psychosocial self-efficacy of people with diabetes, the Quality of Life Index developed by Ferrans and Powers to measure the quality of life in terms of satisfaction and importance of the various aspect of life and the Beck Depression Inventory created by Aaron T. Beck to measure characteristic attitudes and symptoms of depression. The box plot statistical tool was used to display differences between populations without making any assumptions of the underlying statistical distribution. Linear regression was used for the modeling and analysis of numerical data consisting of values of a dependent variable (response variable) and of one or more independent variables (explanatory variables) and to represent unexplained variation in the dependent variable. Clustering also was done to classifyy objects into different groups, or more precisely, to partitiondata set into subsets (clusters), so that the data in each subset (ideally) share some common trait - often proximity according to some defined distance measure. Moreover, discriminant analysis was done to find the linear combination of features that best separate two or more classes of objects or events and the Kruskall-Wallis one-way analysis of variance was used to test the equality of population medians among groups. The results of the study regarding the respondents’ general health status showed that 65% of them do not experience any significant changes in their health status in general. The Quality of Life Index results showed that 73% of the respondents are very satisfied with their quality of life and 92% consider the different aspects of life as very important. The results from the Beck Depression Inventory showed that 91% of the diabetic respondents have the same response particularly on ‘not having thoughts of killing myself’. In the Diabetes Empowerment Subscale it is shown that most of the respondents knows what helps him/her stay motivated to the care of his/her diabetes. Moreover, comparing the different demographic predictors of the respondents, the age group has a bigger impact on the Quality of Life of patients with diabetes, which implies that health care management of these patients are highly individualized.