Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) Patients

Abstract

Aims: To document the HRQoL among AAA patients and to explore how the diagnosis of the disease could affect the HRQoL of the patients. Methods: A questionnaire based study was conducted in alocal university-affiliated vascular tertiary referral center targeting on AAA patients. Quality of life data was collected by a face-to-face interview using the Medical Outcomes Study Short-Form-36 Health Survey (SF-36). A controlled group was obtained from a large local population study matched by gender and age to the AAA group. TheSF-36 scores were compared between the two groups; a multivariate regression analysis was conducted to show the association between the disease and the SF-36 scores.Results:172 out of 252 patients participated the interview, among which 80.31 % were aged 65 years or above, and 85.22 % were males. 92.89 % patients never heard of the disease before diagnosis and 79.74 % patients were detected incidentally. Comparing with the age and gender matched control group, AAA patients had a lower score on 6 out of 8 of quality of life sub-scales: physical functioning (PF), role-physical (RP), role-emotional (RE), vitality (VT), mental health (MH) and social functioning (SF). AAA patients also had a lower score on both physical health summary(PCS) and mental health summary (MCS) than general population. Multivariate regression analysis indicated that PCS was negative associated with age (ß-0.09, P 0.005), female gender (ß-6.38, P 0.001); hypertension (ß-6.66, P 0.001), diabetes (ß-5.46, P 0.011) and supportive care (ß-12.11, P 0.004) tended to have a lower score on PCS. For MCS, the score is negative associated with the disease (ß-9.52, P 0.001), cerebral vascular accident (ß-7.45, P 0.004) and supportive care (ß-9.37, P 0.018); a positive association was detected between the MCS score and the surgical intervention. Conclusions: The diagnosis of AAA can adversely affect the HRQoL of patients, particularly mental dimensions of QoL, before surgical intervention. The attention on HRQoL of AAA patients should not only limited after surgical intervention, but also considered before surgical repair.