Evaluation of Nutritional Status and Allostatic Load in Adult Patients With Type 2 Diabetes

Objective: Diabetes is a chronic disease, affected by nutritional status, and characterized by dysregulations in several systems. Allostatic load is an index that evaluates the dysregulation of all physiological and metabolic systems. This study was conducted to determine the relationship between nutritional status and allostatic load in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).

Methods: The study sample consisted of 30 males and 73 females between 20 and 55 years of age. Individuals had T2DM for 7.9±6.17 (mean ± standard deviation) years. World Health Organization criteria cutoffs were used to calculate allostatic load scores. Twelve parameters were questioned and an allostatic load score between 0 and 12 was obtained; values above the cutoff levels were assigned a value of 1, and values in the normal range were assigned a value of 0.

Results: Individuals with high allostatic load comprised a significant portion of the sample (79.6%) for both males and females (73.3% and 82.2%, respectively). Longer diabetes duration was associated with high allostatic load score (p<0.05). There was lower vegetable consumption and higher fruit consumption in the high-allostatic-load group compared with the low-allostatic-load group (p<0.05). However, fruit consumption was still lower than recommended levels in both groups.

Conclusions: A significant number of individuals had high allostatic load scores in our study. A healthy diet plan in line with the recommendations may help to decrease the allostatic load scores by reducing body weight, waist/hip ratio, blood pressure and fasting blood glucose, and may prevent the negative effects of stress on metabolic processes in the long-term malnutrition in T2DM.