Comportamento alimentar em pacientes ambulatoriais com diabetes tipo 2 e/ou hipertensão: um estudo transversal.

Abstract

Chronic non-communicable diseases are one of the biggest public health problems. Among the main ones are diabetes mellitus and systemic arterial hypertension. The etiology and ways to control these diseases are associated with eating behavior. Thus, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the eating behavior of patients with diabetes and/or hypertension treated at a specialized center in Pelotas, and to associate this behavior with sociodemographic, clinical and nutritional factors. A cross-sectional analysis was performed of patients with type 2 diabetes and/or hypertension, adults and elderly, of both genders, in a first consultation, using a pre-existing database, which was collected between February 2019 and March 2020 Eating behavior was described according to the domains: lack of eating control, cognitive restriction and emotional eating, whose scores were calculated from the vali dated questionnaire Three Factor Eating Questionnaire – Short version with 21 items. The sociodemographic factors evaluated were: gender, age, education and marital status; the clinical ones were: underlying pathology, sleep duration and use of anxiolytic and/or antidepressant medications; and the nutritional ones were: previous nutritional monitoring and nutritional status, classified according to body mass index. Sociodemographic, clinical and nutritional factors were obtained from the standard nutritional anamnesis of the service. Data were analyzed descriptively, using the Shapiro-Wilk test, Mann-Whitney test and Kruskall-Wallis test, adopting a significance level of 5%. Fifty-five patients were evaluated, most of them overweight women and elderly, diagnosed with concomitant diabetes and hypertension. The cognitive restriction domain had the highest median (39, 28 – 67) (p<0,0001). Emotional eating was significantly associated with female gender (p=0.0079). However, lack of dietary control was associated with the use of antidepressant medication (p=0.0403). Thus, it was possible to describe for the first time the eating behavior of this population and find significant differences between the subgroups evaluated.