Challenges related to self-care education in diabetic adolescents

Abstract: Introduction: Diabetes has been declared as a hidden epidemic disease and diabetes type 1 is the second most common chronic illness in adolescent. Because of being chronic, its side effects and their expensive treatments, it's necessary to provide self-care training for these patients. The purpose of this review study was to survey training-related challenges and challenges with regard to the application of self-care behavior among Diabetes adolescents. Methods: The data was gathered through reviewing the related literature, internet browsing and library studies with regard to diabetes and adolescent and its related variables. The keywords used to search in these resources were diabetes, self-care, adolescent, challenge and training. The acceptable time interval for Persian articles was 1385-1391 and for English one was 2005-2017. The databases used for retrieving relevant papers include PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, SID and Magiran. 15 articles were retrieved as a whole and 6 articles were selected among them for further investigation and analysis. Results: by reviewing the related literature and the key concepts, it was shown that factors such as lack of enough social and family support, being chronic, necessity of treatment within home and frequent referral to clinics are among the main obstacles for promotion of self-care behaviors among diabetes adolescent. Conclusion: The main obstacle for self-care behaviors among diabetes adolescent is the shortage or discontinuity observed within teaching self-care behaviors. Other challenges include: socioeconomic factors, patients' demographic factors as well as their clinical features such as the kind of treatment received, the length of disorder and social support received from patient's family. It seems that through teaching self-care procedures, increasing their awareness with regard to its side effects, teaching patient considering the level of literacy within society and social-cultural; class, balancing high treatment expenses through macro hygiene policies, involving families in order to control it and maintaining family support by recommending them to bring a companion in teaching sessions, prediction of influential factors on the completion of self-care behaviors were really influential in promoting patients' self-care activities and their teaching.

Key Words: Adolescent, Diabetes, Self- Care, Challenge.