Assessment of quality of life in patients of end stage renal disease on different modalities of treatment.

This study was conducted to measure quality of life of patients with end stage renal disease on different modalities of treatment. A total of 30 diagnosed cases of end stage renal disease (ESRD) attending BPKIHS were included in the study. Group 1 included 10 patients on regular maintenance hemodialysis, group 2 included 10 patients on continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) and group 3 included 10 patients on regular conservative drugs. The inclusion criteria were all diagnosed cases of ESRD based on the guidelines given by K/DOQI, 2002. A detailed history relating to the disease condition as per the designed proforma was taken, which included demographic data and clinical characteristics of the patients. For assessment of quality of life, KDQOL-SF questionnaire was used. Strata 8.0 software program was used for the analysis of collected data. Physical health was found to be the most severely affected domain of the KDQOL. The mean score for physical health was least in group 1 (33.36 +/- 16.14). Mental health was better in group 2 (54.93 +/- 9.92) than in group 1 (39.50 +/- 14.27) ( "p" value 0.01). Variables like haemoglobin, hematocrit and adequacy of dialysis have positive correlation with all the four domains of the KDQOL. There was a statistically significant correlation of physical health with mental health (p value 0.001), physical health with kidney disease issues (p value 0.001) and mental health with kidney disease issues (p value 0.007). Our study has shown that patients of ESRD have a poor quality of life despite being in some form of dialysis and the most affected domain of the KDQOL scale is physical health. Patients on CAPD have better quality of life than patients on maintenance haemodialysis especially in terms of mental health. Variables like haemoglobin, hematocrit and adequacy of dialysis have a positive correlation with all the four domains of the KDQOL scale i.e. optimizing these variables improves the overall quality of life.