Abstract
BackgroundHeart Failure (HF) results in an immense impact on the patients’ Health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Heart failure patients HRQOL is dependent on the patients’ level of engagement in self-care behaviors. Therefore this study aimed to determine HF patients’ health-related quality of life and its relationship with self-care behaviors.MethodsAn institutional-based study was conducted on 284 heart failure patients at the University of Gondar referral hospital. The data were collected using a structured questionnaire-based interview. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 20. Both descriptive and analytical statistical tests were utilized. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was done to determine the association between HRQOL and different independent variables. Variables with a p-value< 0.05 were considered as a significant predictor of the outcome variable.ResultsThe finding of this study showed that more than sixty-six percent of the study population were females. The overall mean score of HF patients’ quality of life was 46.4 ± 22.4 and the physical and emotional subscale mean score was 20.2 ± 9.8 and 10.5 ± 6.8 respectively. The majority of the study participants 147(51.8%) had poor quality of life. The multinomial logistic regression analysis result showed that rural residence (odds ratio 2.41, 95% CI, 1.23 to 4.71) and inadequate level of self-care practice (odds ratio 2.61, 95% CI, 1.43 to 4.78) were independent predictors of poor HRQOL. The correlation analysis also showed that there was a significant negative relationship between HF patients’ HRQOL score and Self-care practice score (r = − 0.127, P = 0.032).ConclusionOverall, the majority of HF patients had poor HRQOL. Heart failure patients’ HRQOL was significantly associated with place of residence and patients’ level of self-care practice. Therefore, patients with HF are required to learn the benefit of self-care behaviors to improve their quality of life and to decrease the disease progression. Furthermore, HF patients who come from rural areas need special emphasis in each follow-up evaluation.
Highlights
Heart failure is a progressive clinical syndrome affecting more than 38 million people globally [1, 2]
Heart failure-specific health-related quality of life (HRQOL) was assessed by using the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure (HF) Questionnaire (MLHFQ), a 21-item scale that has a physical (8 items) and an emotional (5 items) subscales
The majority (169,59.5%) had less than 5 years of history with the diseases and around two thirds (179,63%) of the study participants had a history of hospitalization due to HF (Table 2)
Summary
Heart failure is a progressive clinical syndrome affecting more than 38 million people globally [1, 2]. Health-related quality of life (HRQL) is a general concept that represents the patient’s overall perception of the impact of an illness and its treatment At a minimum, it reflects physical, psychological (including emotional and cognitive), and social functioning [7]. It is assumed that HF patients’ involvement in the daily self-care behavior activities, including adherence to medication, monitoring of signs and symptoms and lifestyle modifications had a great influence on the disease progression [13, 14]. These selfcare behavior activities among heart failure patients vary considerably in Africa, including Ethiopia [15,16,17]. This study aimed to determine HF patients’ health-related quality of life and its relationship with self-care behaviors
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