Quality of Life of Post-renal Transplant Patients in Rawalpindi

Abstract

The objective is to assess the overall quality of life (QoL) in patients who had undergone renal transplant within the last three years and correlate this index with various demographic variables such as age, gender, marital status, and education level and to correlate the QoL score calculated vs. the health status perceived by the patients themselves Materials and methodsThis was an analytical cross-sectional study, carried out over a period of five months. A total of 123 patients were targeted among which data from 79 patients were gathered including all the patients that underwent kidney transplantation in the past three years at a renal transplant center in CMH, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Non-Probability convenience sampling was used, and data were collected using the WHOQOL-BREF tool that contained 25 questions targeted to four domains (physical, psychological, social, and environmental). The Questionnaire was administered over the phone with proper consent taken beforehand. Data were analyzed using Excel and SPSS version 23. ResultsA total of 79 patients were administered the questionnaire with the mean age of our study population being 35±11 years out of which 84.5% were male and 15.5% were female. Patients received the kidney from relative donors (98.4%) with the highest percentage being sister donors (30.9%). The majority of patients reported from Punjab (54.4%), with the rest from far-flung rural areas. An estimated 62.5% of the patients presented with other systemic/psychological disorders such as DM+, IHD, HTN, Hepatitis C, depression, etc. The mean global score of these patients was 79.21 which can be broken down into four domains, physical domain 80.40, psychological domain 78.99, social domain 82.70, and environmental domain 74.75. ConclusionIn a developing country such as Pakistan, with most of the patients belonging to lower or middle socioeconomic groups, we believe that the patient's own sense of QoL is overshadowed by the mere exuberance of being given a second chance at life which was portrayed by the discrepancies in the perceived vs actual QoL graph. One common recurring theme that was noticed whilst interviewing the patients was that the difficulties they might have faced post-transplant paled in comparison to how grateful they were to live another day. A positive trend was noticed between the time since transplant and the QoL score which could be attributed to various factors such as the use of aggressive immunosuppressants, fear of injury, fear of transplant rejection, etc. in the first-year post-transplant. Demographic variables such as income, age, location, etc. did not affect the scores of these patients on a great scale. The present study aims to guide clinicians in the improvement of long-term outcomes of renal transplantation in Pakistan.

A Systematic Review on Renal Transplantation: Is Quality of Life Compromised After Transplantation

“…Eliza et al research concluded that the employment status has the lowest mean after the transplantation which means the employment status is affected after renal transplantation 27,32 . On the other hand, Jordakieva et al states that there is good employment in post-transplantation individual which is controversial 29. According to certain other research, kidney transplants improve life quality 20,24,25,31 .…”

“…Studies with a minimum accepted scoring of >70% in checklists were selected. This selection has been briefly summarized in (Table 2 [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] and Table 3 32 ).…”

“…A total of 14 articles made it to the final review20-32. (Table 4) contains the details of the relevant 14 articles included [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] .…”