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Mostafa Abdel-Monhem Amr, Tarek Tawfik Amin, Omar Ahmed Al-Omair. Health Related Quality of Life among adolescents with sickle cell disease in Saudi Arabia. The Pan African Medical Journal. 2011;8:10 Key words: Sickle cell disease, adolescents, HRQoL, auality of life, disease complications, socio-demographics Permanent link: http://www.panafrican-med-journal.com/content/article/8/10/full Received: 17/01/2011 - Accepted: 15/02/2011 - Published: 15/02/2011 © Mostafa Abdel-Monhem Amr et al. The Pan African Medical Journal - ISSN 1937-8688. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Health related quality of life among adolescents with sickle cell disease in Saudi Arabia
Mostafa Abdel-Monhem Amr1,&, Tarek Tawfik Amin2, Omar Ahmed Al-Omair3
1Department of Clinical Neuroscience, College of Medicine, King Faisal University-Al Hassa, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2Community Medicine Department, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, 3Department of Internal Medicine, King Fahd Hospital, Al Hufof, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
&Corresponding author
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, College of Medicine, King Faisal University-Al Hassa, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Introduction
Increased life expectancy due to recent medical advances has increased the need to understand more fully the quality of life (QoL) in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) and factors predicting disease adaptation .The objectives of this study were to assess the impairment of health related quality of life (HRQoL) domains in a sample of Saudi Arabian adolescents with SCD.
Methods
A non-probability sample composed of Saudi adolescents with SCD (n=180) aged 14-18 years and comparable age and gender matched healthy controls (n=202). Socio-demographics and disease related data were obtained through personal interview with parents/legal guardians and reviewing patients' medical records. Self-administered 'Short Form-36' questionnaire was used to assess HRQoL of the included groups.
Results
HRQoL showed significant deterioration in adolescents with SCD especially in role physical, general health, and bodily pain domains irrespective of the gender, while female adolescents with SCD demonstrated significant deterioration in emotional wellbeing. Those with SCD-complications showed worse scores along the physical, general health, and emotional wellbeing domains. HRQol scores were negatively associated with increasing age, female gender, rural residence, low family income, presence of disease-related complications and frequent hospital admissions as revealed by multivariate regression analysis.
Conclusion
Saudi adolescents with SCD experience deterioration along all domains of HRQoL especially the physical. Disease related complications and socio-demographic correlates are significant determinants to worse HRQoL among the included adolescents with SCD.
