Well-being and Quality of Life—Medical Perspective

Abstract

The prevalence of chronic diseases, both communicable and non communicable, has continued to increase worldwide and its consequences including psychiatric co-morbidity with accompanying decrease in quality of life of the sufferers. The aim of this study, therefore, was to determine the quality of life of patients with HIV, Tuberculosis, Diabetes Mellitus and Hypertension and the effect of psychiatric comorbidity on the quality of life and well-being of these patients who attend the different outpatient clinics of the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital(UPTH). Following ethical approval and informed consent from the participants, 120 subjects from each group of HIV, Tuberculosis, Diabetes Mellitus and Hypertension were recruited based on the study's inclusion and exclusion criteria. Subjects were further administered with the study's instruments including the socio-demographic/clinical questionnaire, GHQ-12, WHO Composite International Diagnostic Interview (WHO CIDI) and the WHO QOL-Bref. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 statistical package. Confidence interval was set at 95% while P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. The study found a prevalence of psychiatric comorbidity of 43.75% in all. Tuberculosis had the highest prevalence of psychiatric comorbidity with 63(52.5%), followed by. hypertension with 59(49.17%), and Diabetes mellitus 46 (38.3%), while HIV was the least with 42(35%). There were significant relationships between the presence of psychiatric co-morbidity and level of education(p=0.004), income class(p=0.001) in all four medical conditions and self stigma for HIV and tuberculosis. Hypertension had the highest average mean quality of life with 6.34+253 followed by HIV with 60. , diabetes with 5.8 while tuberculosis had the least with mean quality of life 5.3(p=0.001). However, when quality of life was associated with psychiatric comorbidity, the mean quality of life was 5.9, 5.6, 5.2 and 4.9 for Hypertension, diabetes, HIV and tuberculosis respectively. The management of patients with these medical conditions should therefore necessarily include adequate attention to the mental health status the sufferers.