Does End Stage Renal Disease or Type of Renal Replacement Therapy Affect Marital Relationship in Diabetics? A Preliminary Report

Everal studies have assessed marital relationshipin patients with different chronic diseases. however, literature lacks dataregarding this issue in diabetic patients receiving renal replacement therapy. here, we report our preliminary findings regarding thedifferences of marital relationship between diabetics being treated for end-stage renal disease (esrd) and diabetics with normal kidney function. mateirlas and methods: in a case-eontrol study, 94 diabetic patients were divided into three groups according to renal replacement therapy: group i, renal transplanted subjects (n=38); group ii, hemodialysispatients (n=20); group iii, diabetics without esrd (n=36). the groups were matched for gender, age and educational levels. group i and ii were also matched with regard to the duration of esrd. informationon parameters, clinical data, and marital relationship measures was gathered. marital relationship was evaluated with the revised dyadic adjustment scale, which includes four domains of dyadic consensus, affection expression, dyadic satisfaction and dyadic cohesion, with lower scores indicating greater impairment in marital relationship. scores of different subscales were compared betweenthe groups. results: no significant difference was found betweenthe groups with respect to any of the study subscales. in group i, marital relationship and scores of the four marital quality measures were better in patients without any history of renal graft rejection than subjects with such a history.conclusion: we did not find any difference regarding marital relationship between diabetic patients with and without esrd. it also seems that the quality of marital relationship is independent of the type of renal replacement therapy.