Summer camps and quality of life in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes

Abstract

Topics concerning quality of life in children and adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) and summer camps, have only recently appeared in the scientific literature. Interest in quality of life in diabetic patients has lately increased. The Hvidore study group has recruited 2000 patients from several countries and has published an important paper whose conclusions suggest that T1DM patients have a better quality of life if they have a good metabolic control. The aim of this paper is to evaluate if summer camps, seen as an educational and therapeutic tool, can improve quality of life by increasing knowledge and self-management capacities. Certainly summer camps help T1DM children and adolescents to understand that they can be on vacations, practice sports, have fun with other children away from home and parents, just like every other child and adolescent. At summer camps T1DM patients become aware of not being the only ones to deal with the problem of diabetes; in addition parents become aware of their child's skills in the disease management and lastly improve the relationship with the medical staff who will have the opportunity of living an extremely important training experience. The more ambitious aim of summer camps, i.e. the gaining of knowledge and self-management skills and improvement in metabolic control, seems difficult to achieve. The limited literature available suggests that it is unlikely that one or more summer camps will contribute to the improvement of metabolic control; nevertheless, it is not easy to make such evaluations with scientific criteria. We think that Italian guidelines for summer camps should help in standardizing the organization and management; in this way it will be probably easier to evaluate the impact of summer camps on the quality of life.