RESEARCH ARTICLE
Health-Related Quality of Life Among Admitted HIV/AIDS Patients in Selected Ethiopian Tertiary Care Settings: A Cross-Sectional Study
Getandale Zeleke Negera1, *, Teshale Ayele Mega1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 12
First Page: 532
Last Page: 540
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-12-532
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501912010532
Article History:
Received Date: 11/10/2019Revision Received Date: 28/11/2019
Acceptance Date: 19/12/2019
Electronic publication date: 31/12/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
The introduction of Combined Antiretroviral Therapy (cART) shifted the perception of HIV/AIDS from a fatal to a potentially manageable chronic disease. As a result, patient-perceived health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is becoming an important outcome measure among HIV infected patients. We assessed the quality of life of admitted HIV/AIDS patients and the association of socio-demographic, clinical, and psychosocial characteristics of patients with health-related quality of life.
Methods:
Health facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted from April 1 to May 31, 2018 in selected tertiary care hospitals of Ethiopia. HRQoL was measured at discharge using the interviewer-administered World Health Organization’s Quality of Life HIV short-form instrument (WHOQoL-HIV BREF). Data were entered into EpiData 3.2 and exported to SPSS version 21.0 for cleaning and analysis. Descriptive analytical results were reported in text and table. Logistic regression was conducted to identify predictors of poor quality of life. Variables with p-value ≤ 0.25 in bivariate regression were considered as a candidate for multivariable regression. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to identify independent predictors. Regression coefficients and their 95% confidence intervals together with p-value < 0.05 were used to identify independent predictor of poor QoL.
Results:
Majority, 56 (58.9%) of the study participants, had poor general health-related quality of life. Being unemployed (AOR: 4.1, 95% CI; (1.23, 13.64); p=0.02), lack of support from family (AOR: 3.6, 95% CI: (1.05-12.6); p=0.04), and having co-morbidity (AOR: 4.2, 95% CI: (1.08, 16.65); p=0.039) were found to be independent predictors of poor quality of life.
Conclusions:
The study showed that the majority of the participants had poor health-related quality of life which was affected by unemployment, co-morbidity, and social support from family.
