Quality of Life among HIV and AIDS Patients in the Tamale Metropolis

Abstract

Background: There has been a reduction in HIV and AIDS associated morbidity and mortality since the introduction of antiretroviral therapy. However, in contrast to the developed world, very little is documented about the influence of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) on the Quality of Life of HIV patients in developing countries. In Ghana Quality of Life is rarely assessed. This highlights an important gap in the assessment of the health status of HIV and AIDS affected people in the clinical setting where access to HAART continues to increase. This study is to assess the Quality of Life of persons living with HIV and AIDS in the Tamale Metropolis using the World Health Organization Quality of Life – HIV BREF (WHOQOL-HIV BREF). Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Tamale Teaching Hospital. Patients were selected at random from the patient register using a random number generator on MS Excel and interviewed using the WHOQOL-HIV BREF. We assessed quality of life from responses to the WHOQOL-HIV BREF questionnaire. We took 3ml of blood from each patient for haemoglobin and CD4+ lymphocyte estimation. Variables collected with the questionnaire together with the test results were analyzed using Microsoft excel 2013 and Stata 14.0. Results: Of the 377study participants, 290 (76.9%) were females. The mean age of respondents was 39.80 ± 9.70 years. The males were significantly older than the females (45.51 years vs 38.09years p<0.0001), a majority of the study subjects (68.88%) were within the age bracket of 25-44years. The highest domain scores for Quality of Life were recorded in the physical domain (13.81) and the lowest in the social relationship domain (9.89). The overall Quality of Life score was