Health related quality of life among organ transplant recipients

Abstract

This study was aimed to investigate the health related quality of life and related factors of organ transplant recipients. The participants were 188 people who had liver(86), kidney(81), or heart(24) transplanted. Data on the demographic characteristics, transplantation-related characteristics, symptom frequency or discomfort measured by Transplant Symptom Frequency and Symptom Distress Scale by Lough et al(1987), and health related quality of life measured by SF-36(version 2) were collected. Overall health related quality of life score was 492.1 for 100 scoring and, 344.9 for norm based. Physical functioning showed the highest quality of life score (77.5) and vitality showed the lowest(51.1). The kidney transplanted showed the highest quality of life (504.4) and the heart transplanted showed the lowest(426.7) Quality of life was related with occupation(p=.016) and symptom discomfort(p<.0001). The health related quality of life of transplated patients was lower than the norm of American. Further studies need to be done to identify the norm of Korean and to investigate the effect of releving symptom discomfort on the increasing the health related quality of life.