Abstract
BackgroundThe course and corresponding characteristics of quality of life (QOL) domains in trauma population are unclear. Our aim was to identify longitudinal QOL trajectories and determine and predict the sociodemographic, clinical, and psychological characteristics of trajectory membership in physical trauma patients using a biopsychosocial approach.MethodsPatients completed a questionnaire set after inclusion, and at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months follow-up. Trajectories were identified using repeated-measures latent class analysis. The trajectory characteristics were ranked using Cohen’s d effect size or phi coefficient.ResultsAltogether, 267 patients were included. The mean age was 54.1 (SD = 16.1), 62% were male, and the median injury severity score was 5.0 [2.0—9.0]. Four latent trajectories were found for psychological health and environment, five for physical health and social relationships, and seven trajectories were found for overall QOL and general health. The trajectories seemed to remain stable over time. For each QOL domain, the identified trajectories differed significantly in terms of anxiety, depressive symptoms, acute stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, Neuroticism, trait anxiety, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness.DiscussionPsychological factors characterized the trajectories during 12 months after trauma. Health care providers can use these findings to identify patients at risk for impaired QOL and offer patient-centered care to improve QOL.
Highlights
Physical trauma became a major public health problem over the last decade, because an increasing number of patients were treated in the emergency department (ED) after injury [1]
health-related QOL (HRQOL) is a limited definition of quality of life (QOL), as it solely focuses on patients’ subjective perceptions on health, whereas health status (HS) refers to the extent of physical, psychological, and social functioning, but without taken patients’ satisfaction with functioning into account [19]
With regard to the nature of the injury, participants experienced more often a trauma as cyclist and they more often had an isolated head injury compared to non-participants
Summary
Quality of Life Research (2021) 30:1317–1335 psychological problems (e.g., anxiety and depressive symptoms), disorders (e.g., acute and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) [3,4,5,6,7,8], and impaired quality of life (QOL; i.e., a subjective and multidimensional concept of person’s physical health, psychological state, personal beliefs, social relationships and their relationship to salient features of their environment) [9,10,11,12,13] These disabilities and disorders were, together with sociodemographic (e.g., older age, female sex, low education) and clinical (e.g., higher injury severity score, hospital stay and ICU admission) characteristics, related to impaired health-related QOL (HRQOL) or health status (HS) [9, 12, 14,15,16,17,18].
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