Health-related quality of life in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Abstract

Background: The relative impact of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) on health-related quality of life (HRQL) compared to other chronic liver diseases has not been fully explored. Aim: To compare the domain scores of the 29-item Chronic Liver Disease Questionnaire (CLDQ) for patients with NAFLD to those with chronic hepatitis B and chronic hepatitis C. Methods: A HRQL questionnaire, CLDQ, was routinely administered to patients attending a liver clinic. Additional clinical and laboratory data were obtained on patients with NAFLD, chronic hepatitis B, and chronic hepatitis C from our quality of life database. Scores for each of the six CLDQ domains were compared using one-way anova and multiple regression. Results: Complete data were available for 237 patients. NAFLD patients scored lowest on multiple CLDQ domains. Based on the bivariate data, NAFLD patients have the poorest HRQL, followed by chronic hepatitis C and chronic hepatitis B patients. Multivariate analysis showed that some specific domain score correlations remained significant for NAFLD diagnosis, cirrhosis, gender, and body mass index. Conclusion: NAFLD patients had significantly lower quality of life scores compared with patients with hepatitis B or hepatitis C on multiple CLDQ domains, suggesting that HRQL was severely impaired in patients with NAFLD. © 2007 The Authors.