Hemodiyalize Giren Kronik Böbrek Yetmezliği Hastalarında Yaşam Kalitesi ve Etkileyen Faktörler.

AIM: Today health services aim to provide a higher level of life quality to individuals as much as possible and not being limited only to providing a good treatment. In this context it was aimed to evaluate the life quality and the factors affecting this in chronic renal failure (CRF) patients undergoing hemodialysis. METHOD: A total of 144 adult patients with CRF from two dialysis centers in Adana, one private and one in a University, were included in the study. A questionnaire investigating demographic characteristics and short form health survey "SF-36" were filled by face-to-face interview technique. RESULTS: Male to female ratio of the participants was 91(63.2%) to 53(36.8%). The mean dialysis history was calculated as 44.4±34.3 months. One to six other diseases were recorded with a mean number of 2.9±1.1 to be concurrent to CRF. SF-36 revealed a health status score mean (TS=total score) of 48.1±21.8, with physical status scale (PSS) score mean of 46.0±21.1 and mental status scale (MSS) score mean of 50.3±22.0. The same scores were calculated to be significantly lower in females (with 40.4, 39.8 and 38.0, respectively) in comparison to males (with 52.5, 50.3 and 50.6, respectively) (p<0.05). As SF-36 scores lower than 51 were reported to be "low", and even to be predictive of risky situations, when the risk effects of factors like age, gender, marital status, educational status, length of dialysis history and presence of concurrent diseases were investigated, only lower educational status and the number of concurrent diseases were found to be significant for the risk increase. CONCLUSION: In the context of preventive medicine, optimum functionality is a secondary prevention in chronic diseases. Life quality indexes are not only important evaluators of the functionality, but they play a major role in the prevention of mortality, too. Hence health surveys like SF-36, based on patient's reporting, are suggested to be introduced in evaluations, not being limited to the evaluations based on performance scoring only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]