Relationship between sociodemographic factors and quality of life in hemodialysis patients

Abstract

Introduction: chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a progressive alteration that can lead to renal replacement therapy (hemodialysis, HD). This situation has an impact on the quality of life and is affected by the patient's sociodemographic factors.
Objective: determine the relationship between sociodemographic factors and quality of life in hemodialysis patients.
Methods: cross-sectional analytical study in a population of 92 patients with a diagnosis of CKD in stage V, with HD treatment. Biomedical data were collected with a dialysis record. Quality of life was estimated with the KDQOL-36 scale. Their scores were compared according to two or more groups with Mann-Whitney U tests, or Kruskal-Wallis, respectively. Spearman's correlation coefficient was used for ordinal variables. R-Studio was applied.
Results: education is statistically related to “symptoms/problems” (p=0,0176), “effects of kidney disease” (p=0,0054), and “burden of kidney disease” (p=0,0200), with a tendency to observe higher scores in university studies; while economic income was the same with these last two factors (rho=0,24 and rho=0,23, respectively). Furthermore, the “symptoms/problems” score was statistically higher in men than women (74.3 versus 64.1; p=0,00417) and in the case of the “physical component” summary, patients treated in a center public hospital presented statistically higher scores compared to patients treated in private centers (38,1 versus 32,0; p=0,00607).
Conclusions: there are aspects of quality of life that are linked to sociodemographic factors that health professionals can consider to focus efforts of the health team and improve this important variable