Coping Skills and Associated Factors in Children and Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes: A Systematic Review

Children with Diabetes Mellitus face numerous challenges and they rely on coping strategies for managing them. This review was done to assess effective factors on coping skills of these patients.  

This is a systematic review on the effective factors on coping skills of children with diabetes mellitus. Data bases of Medline, Scopus, EMBASE, and Google Scholar were systematically reviewed for cross-sectional, cohort, case-control and randomized controlled trial assessing the effective factors on coping skills and strategies in diabetes, English articles without date restriction until Oct, 06, 2019. We included 543 articles and after reviewing and evaluating by Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal tools checklist, 14 articles remained for analysis.  

A review of 14 articles showed different scales were used for assessment of coping skills in the absence of a comprehensive one. Also, demographic factors, gender, social economic status, family size, sibling, disease variables, school performance, puberty, and metabolic control were factors assessed in different studies, but none of them were significant in all studies.  

It seems in studies there is a lack of a comprehensive, standardized coping assessment tool appropriate for children and adolescents considering age, gender, puberty, socioeconomic status, and different psychosocial factors.