Mindfulness-based interventions boost teens with Type 1 diabetes

A team of experts at Children’s National Hospital, using the input of teens with Type 1 diabetes from our Children’s National clinics, adapted a six-week virtual group diabetes education program and mindfulness-based intervention. In their new study published in Journal of Pediatric Psychology, the team described how the intervention might work to support teens with Type 1 diabetes experiencing anxiety or depression.

The findings showed that both the mindfulness-based intervention and the diabetes education program were successfully implemented and valued by the participating teens. While the study was limited in scope, focusing primarily on assessing the programs’ acceptance and perceived value among adolescents, preliminary results suggest participation in the programs may also contribute to improvements in mood, diabetes-related distress and glycemic control.

Moly Basch, Ph.D., and Eleanor Mackey, Ph.D., both psychologists and authors of the study, shared more about their learnings.

What’s been the hold-up in the field?

Many adolescents with Type 1 diabetes experience symptoms of anxiety and depression, yet it can be hard to access care to relieve some of these symptoms. Group-based, brief virtual care may be a way to provide more access to necessary support. Testing whether such programs are desired and useful by teens and their families, and whether they show promise for improving symptoms of depression and anxiety, is an important step in addressing this gap in care.

How does this work move the field forward?

This study helped us to use the input of the teens we hope to serve to create and adapt programs that they were enthusiastic about and test them to see if they were helpful. We used these findings to obtain a second grant from the National Institutes of Health to do a larger scale study to see whether these programs help with depression, anxiety, eating, stress and diabetes management.

What’s the goal and how will this work benefit patients?

Our ultimate goal is to create easy to access programs which help improve anxiety, depression and diabetes management in teens with Type 1 diabetes. We are trying to ensure that these programs are feasible and accessible and could be translated into our clinics if they prove to be beneficial. We hope to improve the ways we identify teens experiencing anxiety and depression and provide them the option for this brief group-based care in our clinics.

What did you find that excites you and what’s next?

We were very excited to find that teens were interested in enrolling in these programs and found them useful. We were also excited to see that our very preliminary data indicates that mindfulness-based interventions may improve depression and even possibly glycemic control.

Children’s National is the first institution that we know of to use teen feedback to adapt a mindfulness-based intervention specific to teens with Type 1 diabetes. Our team is now preparing to embark on a five-year project in collaboration with the Barbara Davis Center in Colorado to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs with a larger group of teens.

Additional authors from Children’s National include: Katherine Patterson Kelly, Ph.D., R.N.; Randi Streisand, Professor, Ph.D., CDCES; and Jack Vagadori.