Health Related Quality of Life in a Large Community Sample of Diabetic Patients in a Spanish Region

Abstract

The background of this article is to evaluate Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) of patients with diabetes mellitus living in the community and to assess associated factors. A crosssectional survey through telephone interviews was performed on a sample of patients diagnosed with diabetes mellitus, randomly selected from the Primary Care Database of a Spanish region . The survey included information on sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, HRQoL (SF-12v2), and health-related behaviours. Poor health was defined as a score below the 25 th percentile of the corresponding gender and age group of the general population based-norms. Logistic regression models were constructed, separately by gender, to identify the factors associated with poor health. Of 1,187 patients included, only 22.6% and 31.5% presented, respectively, poor physical and mental health. The lowest HRQoL was observed in middle-aged women with diabetes, (OR= 12.0 [95%CI=5.6-25.8] for poor physical health and 6.9 [95%CI=3.5-13.7], for poor mental health). Non-psychiatric comorbidity was independently associated to poor physical health (OR= 2.5 [95%CI=1.5-4.2] for female and 1.7 [95%CI=1.0-2.7] for male patients). On the other hand, physical activity was a protective factor of both poor physical and poor mental health, among both female and male diabetics (ORs ranging from 0.4 to 0.6). HRQoL of community diabetes patients is heterogeneous and particularly worse for female than for male patients. A similar positive association with better HRQoL was found for both genders between physical activity and absence of comorbidity. These results provide very relevant patient-based outcomes to facilitate the identification of vulnerable patients to design specific health programs.